Telling, telling, telling ...  So many in the field of story work focus on storytelling. Sure, telling a good story at the right time has impact. But storytelling represents a mere fraction of what can be done with business stories.

Here is one little example.

Last year I had a call from Kirstyn. She works in HR for a large engineering firm. Kirstyn runs a program for their graduate employees to build their skills over three years. This firm has some or the world's engineering and scientific experts and the graduate employees get the opportunity to work shoulder to shoulder with these experts on some amazing projects. The thing is, the graduates often don't make the most of it because they rarely get to hear what these experts have actually done in their careers. Why? Because they graduates are unskilled in asking story-eliciting questions.

So we set about helping about 40 graduate employees learn how to elicit stories from their expert colleagues. And after learning the basics we wheeled in some senior experts as guinea pigs to practice with. It was a great way to practice their new story-listening skills but more importantly it was an opportunity to get to know some of the more senior folk in the firm.

And because we know that people remember what they feel we asked Melbourne Playback Theatre to perform some of the stories the experts shared with the graduates.

Here is one of the stories.

You could hear a pin drop as the graduates heard Clare tell this story and their jaws dropped when Melbourne Playback Theatre performed the story for everyone.

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Thomas Jefferson was a great believer in luck, and he found that the harder he worked the luckier he got. His friend and fellow signatory of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin, shared this belief in hard work and self development. From a remarkably young age Franklin understood the importance of practice. Not the kind you get knocking a tennis ball around with friends. But that drilled, repetitive practice of hitting the same shot over and over again. Benjamin, however, didn't have his eye on Wimbledon (actually it's kind of a temporal impossibility), rather his ambition was to be a man of letters.

The Anecdote blog is all about how leaders can return humanity to the workplace and the vital role stories play. I get a little tired of leaders who hear about the value of storytelling and then tell me they don't have the time to learn how to do it. The fact is it takes practice to be good at anything. Some estimate 10,000 hours of practice. But it is not just any type of practice. You need to engage in deliberate practice just like Ben Franklin did to be world the renowned writer and communicator he became.

Terrence Gargiulo and I and going to share some of our ideas about storytelling deliberate practice in a webinar next week. Please feel free to come along and join our conversation.

We're doing this webinar twice, one timed for Asia Pacific and the other for the Americas. Just click on the link of the webinar you want to attend and fill in your details.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM Aust. EST

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM USA PDT

The story about Ben Franklin comes from his autobiography. You can read the whole thing on Google Books.

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Bob Dickman, who wrote Elements of Persausion, just sent me this note that has this thought provoking story in it which I though you would like. If you are in California you might like to attend his storytelling workshop.

I've just returned from visiting some friends of mine in Maui. They told me an amazing story.

800 miles off the Hawaiian coast, an oil tanker caught on fire, and the blaze moved so quickly that the captain didn’t have time to radio for help. Fortunately an American cruise ship was nearby, and the entire crew was rescued. But as the cruise ship began sailing away, someone heard barking coming from the tanker. The tanker's captain realized that his dog, a small brown and white terrier named Hokget, had been left on board. When the cruise reached port, passengers immediately alerted the Humane Society about the missing dog. Soon the news media was winging the story all around the world, and checks began pouring in. One check was for $5,000. Public pressure was so great that the US Navy and Coast Guard sent ships and planes to find Hokget. Eventually he was rescued alive and returned safely to Hawaii. It has been estimated that millions of dollars were spent in recovering that one little terrier.

What happened? Why did this dog capture the imagination and resources of all these people? After all, we live in a world where millions of children (as well as countless dogs and cats) go hungry every day. This little terrier had a name and his plight was told as a story rather than a statistic. People responded because they felt something immediate and visceral. They were moved to take action. Statistics and abstractions don’t make people act, stories do.

When facts and emotion combine to produce a story, people will act. Facts alone are too distant and cold. They produce indifference.

Are you differentiating yourself from your competition using facts alone? What stories are you telling about your business? Are they abstract and distant, or do they engage people and get them excited about your new business ideas, products and services?

Come to the August 21st workshop with author and master storyteller Bob Dickman. Work on your story in a positive, engaging and creative environment. Practice and improve your story making abilities. Turn indifference into action.

There are four spaces left for the August Workshop.

Thanks,
Bob

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Last week I was driving to basketball with my daughter listening to Hamish and Andy on the radio. Richard Branson was up next to talk about the launch of Virgin Money and this is what he said (perhaps not word perfect but how I remember it):

Andy: so tell us about this new venture Sir Richard

I can see this little story having an impact for three reasons:

• it's told as a story where the little guy is up against the four big, bad guys (we like a challenge story)
• it reminds us of how Branson introduced Virgin Blue and how flight costs tumbled
• it's a story so can be easily remembered and retold

Have you heard other CEOs launch products or a company with a story/

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In the 1970s Irene Pepperberg was studying for her PhD at Harvard in theoretical chemistry but wasn't really loving it. Then she learned about the interesting work that was happening in training animals to communicate with humans. People were working with chimps and dolphins and amazing strides were being made. She was hooked and threw in her chemistry studies and switched to working with animals,

She decided her animal of choice would be a parrot. You would train them to talk and they lived for a long time. So Irene got a Grey Parrot and called him ALEx, which stood for Avian Learning Experiment.

But the research community thought she was nuts. Parrots had small brains, the size of a walnut, and weren't parrots merely pets anyway. How could she be objective in her research? Getting funding was hard but she managed to get a one year grant to get started.

In the first 10 years Alex learned 50 labels for objects. He could tell if an object was one of 7 colours, up to 5 shapes, whether the shape was 2-6 cornered and what material is was made from, such as wood.

Irene would ask him questions and Alex would answer.

"Alex, what's this?"

And he would say, "block."

"Good birdie, and what colour?"

"Blue."

"Good boy, and what shape?"

"Four corners."

"And what matter?"

"Wood."

But despite the progress Irene struggled to get significant support for her work. Grants would come one year at a time rather than the 3-4 years that was normal. Her marriage broke down but she kept going with her research with Alex.

When Alex was 15 they were asked to do a BBC radio interview. By this stage Alex was developing quite a personality because he could now ask questions and interact with Irene.

To start the interview Irene was in a room with the radio host where Alex could not hear what was happening. She told the audience that she was holding an orange square piece of wood. And then the audience hears Irene's heels, click, click, click, as she walks into the room with Alex.

"Alex I'm going to ask you some questions, we are going to do some work." Irene shows the wooden square and says, "What colour?"

And in his little birdie voice Alex says, "No, you tell me what shape."

"OK Alex, it's four cornered. Tell me what colour."

"Tell me what matter," says Alex.

"OK Alex it's wood. Can you tell me what colour?"

"No, how many?"

"Alex, there is only one toy here. Alex, come on, what colour?"

"No, tell me what shape."

"OK Alex, time out, you are misbehaving," and you hear Irene's heels click, clicking as she starts to walk out the door, giving him a time out, and then comes a little birdie voice,

"I'm sorry ... come here ... orange."

Alex and Irene became famous in both the popular press and among her academic colleagues. They had achieved so much to show how animals can communicate with humans.

Sadly Alex died in 2001 aged 30, twenty years younger that what Irene expected and she was devastated. But she showed everyone that amazing things can be done with time, persistence and a parrot with the brain the size of a walnut.

I heard this story on The Moth podcast. You can hear it here.

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I had a great day on Tuesday exploring a Community of Practice that has formed within a NSW local government council. This group call themselves the green champions and 40 representatives across the council participate to make sustainability an integral part of every staff member's daily activities. The aim is to 'show by doing'.

Some of the reasons it works: the CEO and elected leader openly advocate the group and provide legitimacy for its activities. This encourages managers to support the involvement of their staff. There is a small core group that work to tap into and unleash the Green Champions' passion for sustainability. Members of the group spoke about how the Green Champions allows them to make a difference, how they learn about sustainability and can take that home and into their personal lives (such as the school sustainability committee). Some of them have the opportunity to apply their formal qualifications in water, waste, energy management etc. Members described some of the key success factors as the informal nature of the group, how it can avoid some of the internal red tape to get things done, their opportunity to contribute ideas and see them actioned and how every area of the business is represented. The group like it that they are a little edgy and can push the boundaries to get things done.

An example of how the group makes a difference:

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For change to stick it's often a good idea to find where things are working and then figure out how to get those successful behaviours happening where you need them.

I often tell this story, which I've read in Switch, to illustrate this positive approach to change.

UPDATE: On the weekend I listened to this HBR podcast which has another telling of this story and introduces a new book by Jerry Sternin et al called Power of Positive Deviance

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Are you tired of reading blog posts? For a change how about just listening about storytelling? Makes sense really.

I recorded this podcast for a group of executives in New York and thought you might also enjoy it. It describes why I think storytelling is an important leadership skills, why stories have impact, provides a couple of tips on becoming a better storyteller, describes what we mean by strategic stories and shows how story work can be much more than merely telling tales.

Here's the link to the audio file.

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Why do you remember some people and completely forget others?

It really reinforced in me a quote by Terrence Gargiulo:

A story is the shortest distance between two people

So, if you want people to remember you, tell them a story.

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The conversation didn't need to be held that way. We could have just talked and I would have learned that there is a process I needed to follow. I had no idea, but I should have guessed. It just reinforced in me that I can't stand bullying behaviour and, quite frankly, managers who are arseholes.

As such at Anecdote we have long held the "no arsehole rule" made famous by the Stanford professor, Bob Sutton. Adopting this rule has resulting in us firing a client and vowing to never work with someone who was a partner.

What amazes me however is just how these workplace arseholes continue to thrive in organisations. One view is that they have to work somewhere but surely we can create working environments that reflect a humane and reasonable work ethic.

I feel this mentoring program we designed and are delivering for a client is helping to increase humanity to the workplace. We've taken an informal approach to mentoring and have avoided the arranged marriage approach where someone in HR matches mentors and mentees (we've called the mentee the kouhai, a Japanese word with a similar meaning but doesn't sound like the tasty peppermint Mintie). In fact the informality goes further because we are advocating not even asking someone to be your mentor, which can create a rather awkward moment, rather we want people to just ask colleagues they respect and want a mentoring relationship for their view or guidance on a issue. We are focussing on the verb 'mentoring' above the noun, 'mentor.'

This approach fails however unless the potential mentor is mindful that these approaches will happen and when they do they can switch themselves into mentoring mode. We call this 5-minute mentoring and the mentor knows (because they have experienced a range of stories from their workplace illustrating good mentoring behaviour) that they need to focus on the interests of the kouhai above, say, the interests of the company.

If enough people experience narrative-based mentoring program we believe the behaviour of managers changes and humanity increases. We have seen this happen in our narrative leadership programs with simple behaviour changes such as giving someone your full attention when they enter your office.

Let's rid our workplace of arsehole behaviour. And the quicker we do it the better we will all be for it.

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Here is a nice little story from CEO of Nike, Mark Parker.

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Carolyn runs a company, Connect Marketing, focussed on helping small businesses be brilliant at marketing. We met in 2008 when we were both guests on the Sky News Money Makers program hosted by David Koch. We were speaking on various aspect of collaboration.

And in case you are wondering, we met at Coogee beach.

.

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Our mind is full of beliefs, assumptions and values which affect what we do and how we do it. Much of what we assume comes from our experiences, especially if we've told ourselves and others the story of what happen and what it means for us. Our stories help us remember and embed our assumptions.¹ If we want to change our actions we need new stories that create and embed a new belief, assumption or value. We need to see it and feel it before we will change.²

One can take a systematic approach to triggering these new stories by first uncovering the assumptions you or your group live by and then designing simple experiments to test these assumptions. Kegan and Lahey do a terrific job describing a process for uncovering assumptions in Immunity to Change.³ They don’t mention stories in their approach but as I was reading their practical chapters at the end of the book it was screaming out to me that what they were advocating was a systematic way to trigger stories that could replace the unhelpful ones. The aim is to create new stories for yourself that help you to act in a new way.

Our assumptions and beliefs nearly always serve a purpose because if they didn’t they would have gone the way of the Dodo. But sometimes these same assumptions hold us back. Here is an example of a big assumption that really seemed to limit what this person thought was possible.

It was clear she’d had a bad experience and was operating under the assumption that you must be guarded and careful with whatever you say to those in power otherwise you might loose your job. Now here was an assumption worth testing.

The first step is to start to think like George Costanza from the Seinfeld sitcom when he decided to do the opposite of everything he would normally do. As Jerry says in the episode, “if every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.” So take the assumption “I assume if I’m frank and open with my boss, he will get angry” and design a test that does the opposite of what the assumption would advise and do the opposite. It’s important to note that your experiment should be safe. Avoid tackling assumptions where you believe an action will result in death, being fired, losing a relationship etc. Break down these more dramatic assumptions into smaller, less dramatic ones and test around the edges at first.

Then, most importantly, notice what happens. Kegan and Lahey suggest you plan for the results and think about the things that will indicate what happened and whether they tell you something new about the assumption. What did you think and feel? What did others think and feel? Which outcomes would really lead you to question the validity of your assumption?

Strong assumptions are unlikely to yield in a single test. You will need to conduct a series of experiments and reflect deeply on the results. Each experiment will create a new story for you and the ones that produce something counter to your preconceived ideas, the ones that are unanticipated will be the ones you will tell others and a change in mindset and behaviour will follow. Of course all this assumes you really want to change.

References

1. Schank, R.C. & Berman, T.R. 2002, 'The Pervasive Role of Stories in Knowledge and Action', in MC Green, JJ Strange & TC Brock (eds), Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahway, New Jersey.

2. Kotter, J.P. & Cohen, D.S. 2002, The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Massachusetts.

3. Kegan, R. & Lahey, L.L. 2009, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome it and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization, Harvard Business Press, Boston, Massachusetts.

4. Patterson, K., Grenny, J., Maxfield, D., McMillan, R. & Switzler, A. 2008, Influencer: The Power To Change Anything, McGraw Hill, New York.

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Dave Bruebeck, the jazz virtuoso, once said "there is no mistake if you can resolve it."

I was reminded of this quote when Steve Hopkins told me this story about what happened at World Vision around the time of the Haiti earthquakes.

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Every company wants to tell a compelling story that conveys the essence of what they're about. If it's a success their customers and employees will know where they have come from and where they are going and what makes them unique and worthwhile. And with this knowledge they become attracted to what they are offering. Stories are great for answering the question, 'why?' Why are we investing in this equipment? Why are we hiring these type of people? Why are we spending so much time with our new employees? Why? Why? Why?

I've a treat for you (thanks @vivmcw for the link). A superb example of an company telling a series of stories to explain what makes them tick. But before you feast your eyes on some terrific storytelling keep the following in mind: while it can be important to share your company story to a mass audience with the artistry only a Madison Avenue ad firm can deliver, it's more important your leaders can tell your organisation's story, without notes, to everyone they work with. And from my experience helping executive teams craft and tell their strategic story, the process of working it out is as important as telling the strategic story.

Did you enjoy that? What I really enjoyed was how the narrator (company founder Kihachiro Onitsuka--or perhaps an actor playing him) recounted a series of anecdotes describing key events in the history of ASICS so that we inferred a bunch of things that are not actually said explicitly in the video. For example I felt that ASICS was continually innovating, that they had a long a proud history, they invested in state of the art technology, and they were willing to destroy the past to create the future.

Can your leaders tell your strategic story?

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I've just found Garr Reynold's recent post on stories and experience. He makes the good point that people remember stories because they convey emotions, which is very true. We remember what we feel. In this post I would like to briefly explore another reason why we remember stories and touch on the types of stories which are most memorable. Let's take the last point first.

Garr tells us that he visited Haleakala National Park in Japan The park has beautiful but dangerous water falls and sign-posts warn visitors to be careful. Garr noticed that one of the sign-posts seemed more effective that the others because it included actual news clippings of people who had lost their lives. These tragic incidents were told as stories.

Apart from the obvious emotion these stories generated what else might be drawing our attention to these stories? One possibility comes from taking a human evolution and natural selection perspective. Over the 10,000s of years our species has been evolving we've been preoccupied by our own survival (avoiding death), the survival of our children (continuing the species) and sex (creating the next generation). Consequently we care deeply about death, sex and the safety of our children. Any story that feature these topics gains our attention. It helps explain the proliferation of hospital and police dramas on our TVs. So stories of death are hard for us to resist and warning signs that contain these types of stories are attention magnets.

It's true that we remember what we feel but we also remember what we conjure for ourselves. To illustrate this point would you please read this story. I have some questions at the end.

OK, as you were reading this story what could you see in your mind's eye? Could you see the mother and son having dinner? Did you see them walking arm in arm? Did you see him ring his mother? Did you see the envelop and the receipt it contained?

People see stories. We literally re-experience the story with the person telling it and this act of re-creation make the story our own. We remember what we can see and experience.

OK, what about this.

• Stories are memorable because they evoke emotion.
• We remember stories because we visualise what's happening and create our own personal version of the story
• Three of the most memorable types of stories feature death, sex and the safety of children.

What did you see? If you are like me you didn't see a thing. Dots points and opinions don't create imagery and therefore don't conjure emotions and are mostly forgettable.

The story was posted to PassionHR list 16/3/10 by Mannish Aggarwal

Hat tip to David Zinger's post 23 Employee Engagement Eclectic Resource Zingers (No. 13) for the link to Garr's post.

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Here are my two suggestions. Love to hear yours in the comments.

Personal motivation initiative: we are creating a one-page handout describing why the team manager is an important role and listing four things every manager must do to be great at the job. The first on the list is to collect registration fees on time. I did think we should include a short story of how a manager did one of these tasks (more on this idea below).

Social motivation initiative: For the next four months we will share with all the team managers the overall percentage of teams that are all paid up and either congratulating them of getting all their fees in or encouraging to be as good as the rest. The overall percentage at the outset will be large which will send the message that most people are paying (social proof).

To add to this thinking I discovered this morning some important influence research which shows how stories can be added to this mix with tremendous effect. Over at the Inside Influence Report Noah Goldstein reports on Adam Grant's research showing that reminding people of the meaning and significance of their work can double their productivity. And he did this by simply sharing stories from those people who benefited from the call centre worker's hard work: in this case benefactors of a fundraising organisation.

Here is how Grant ran his experiment.

So my question is who's story does the team managers need to hear? I can't imagine hearing a story from the committee of how getting the money in on time will motivate anyone. Perhaps it needs to be a story from one of the players that received a scholarship or from a parent in the under eights who gets reduced fees to get them started. Or maybe it is a story from one of the coaches who all just received new coaches tops.

Grant, A. M. (2008). The significance of task significance: Job performance effects, relational mechanisms, and boundary conditions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 108-124.

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Daniel Kahneman, the founder of behavioural economics and winner of the Nobel prize in Economics, tell this story in a recent TED talk.

Of course the screeching didn't ruin his whole experience because he had 20 minutes or so listening to a beautiful symphony. It did, however, ruin his memory of the experience.

Endings are important. Kahneman describes Dan Ariely research¹ on how people perceive pain when they have a colonoscopy.

Check out these two graphs Kahneman showed in his TED talk. They report two patients' experience of pain during a colonoscopy. The second patient clearly endured more pain over a longer period. Interestingly, when ask to report on their memory of the experience the second patient remembered it to be less painful than the first. Ariely's research concludes that people remember an experience based on what happens as the end, especially if it's trending in a direction (such as, to lower pain).

So it's important to focus on the end. We remember the whole in terms of what happens at the end. With the colonoscopy research they found that just leaving in the tube for longer and not wiggling around too much gave people a happier ending.

It's no coincidence then that a common plot structure is one where the story builds to a strong ending.

You can use this type of plot structure to plan and deliver a presentation so everyone remembers the experience. Of course a good memory of the event happens when the last thing you did is satisfying.

1. Ariely, D. 1998, 'Combining Experiences Over Time: The Effects of Duration, Intensity Changes and On-Line Measurements on Retrospective Pain Evaluations', Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, vol. 11, pp. 19-45.

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It's interesting how we often don't make a comment when someone provides a great service day in, day out but we really notice when someone recovers well when the chips are down.

So if you are anywhere near Coburg and need printing services I highly recommend Kelvin's Kwik Kopy shop. Here is his address and contact details.

Kwik Kopy Printing Centre Coburg

Kelvin Minerds

583 Sydney Road, Coburg, VIC 3058

Phone (03) 9354 5822

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Agassiz (nicely told by Karl Weick on an article on richness) was acutely aware of the human propensity to name something, to categorise it, and then discover its properties vanish before our eyes. Once named we no longer need to attend to the details to work it out. As Weick points out, naming things is an essential action to coordinate activities. Unfortunately we lose detail in the process.

One way to keep richness in our understanding is to identify the stories that represent situations. We are currently working for a government agency helping them to create and tell their strategic story. They've identified seven strategic directions and in and of themselves are abstract ideas such as, achieve with our partners, be easy to deal with, nurture independence. These ideas only make sense when illustrated by an prototypical story.

References

Cooper, L. 1987, 'Louis Agassiz as a teacher', in CR Christensen (ed.), Teaching and the case method, Harvard Business School, Boston, pp. 79–82.

Weick, K.E. 2007, 'The Generative Properties of Richness', Academy of Management Journal, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 14–9.

HT to Tim Kannegieter for pointing me to the Weick paper.

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Seth Godin has a new ebook out called What Matters Now. It consists of 80 or so thought leaders each with a page to talk about an idea that matters to them. Each idea is summed up in a single word such as Dignity, Autonomy, Attention, Difference. You can download the ebook here.

Dan and Chip Heath have a page with the title, Change. They incorporate three ideas in their one-pager that is dear to our work: stories, positive deviance and changing behaviour. Here is what they wrote.

We’re wired to focus on what’s not working. But Murphy asked, “What IS working, today, and how can we do more of it?”

You’re probably trying to change things at home or at work. Stop agonizing about what’s not working. Instead, ask yourself, “What’s working well, right now, and how can I do more of it?”

Chip and Dan Heath are the authors of Made to Stick and the soon-to-be-released book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard.

It's not a coincidence that the Heath brothers decided to tell a story to illustrate their idea and try and persuade the reader to adopt a different approach to change. They dedicate a chapter to the power of stories in their book, Made to Stick and conclude the book saying that most of the other effects described in the other chapters are encapsulated in stories. So let's look at some of the features of this story and why it might be effective.

The simple story structure creates an image for us of both Bobby and Murphy (and let's not forget Ms. Smith). I can see Bobby sitting on a swivel chair restless and bored. If the story creates vivid images for us there is a good chance it will grab our attention and we will remember it. We've all seen Bobbys in our life, so it's easy to picture him in this story.

Names are important. Humans care about other humans. We want to know the names. Case studies often lack names and suffer for it. Again it creates attention through authenticity and empathy for people.

Also notice how they start with the story and then provide the advice. They didn't want the reader to slip into a confirmation bias where we automatically discount suggestions as our first instinct. The story first allows us to pull the idea to us, own the idea ourselves before a suggestion is made by the experts.

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In my hands is a corporate strategy. It’s a glossy six-page document designed for every employee to memorise and enact. There are seven themes each with three sub-themes. There are also seven values. All the information is presented as dot points well set out with lots of white space for easy reading. Sadly this strategy is unlikely to stick. Perversely, it could even cause the exact opposite behaviour the leaders desire. Here are three reasons for my statement.

1. It’s hard to remember a set of ideas without an organising schema. Neuroscientist John Medina reminds us that we need to get the overall gist of something before we can attend to the details. Watch this video for an example of what he means.

One way to provide the overall context for a strategy is to create a strategic story that places the company’s directions within a schema. That way people get the gist of the strategy and can then attach more and more meaning.

2. Too many things on our mind diminishes our willpower. Implementing a strategy requires willpower and as a recent Wall Street Journal article describes it only takes a moderate cognitive load before we succumb to temptation. In my opening example here are at least 28 things to remember about the corporate strategy which will definitely overload our ability to remember it but more importantly it could be sapping our will to stay the new strategic course.

In applying this idea we would be better off introducing parts of the strategy over time so people can concentrate on one or two changes at a time, perhaps over a 90 day period, before introducing the next part.

3. We remember what we see. In a corollary to the aphorism, 'we remember was we feel,' it is also true that we much more likely to recognise and recall something when we can see it. As John Medina puts it, “The phenomenon is so pervasive, it has been given its own name: the pictorial superiority effect.”

This idea immediately gets us thinking of the splendid pictures we can include with our strategies, those striking images that conjure the essence of what our company is all about. This is the standard approach but there are two other types of images you should consider back-of-the-napkin drawings and the images created by stories.

Dan Roam has created a business from helping people sketch out their thinking, back-of-a-napkin style. In his book with the unsurprising title, The Back of the Napkin, Roam illustrates the power of a simple diagram to share an idea. If you can’t sketch it on a napkin, forget it, it’s too complicated. So ensure everyone can tell your company’s strategic story with the aid of some simple sketches.

Effective stories paint pictures for us as well. When someone recounts a compelling story we visualise what’s happening. And because we are playing out the action in our mind’s eye the story becomes memorable for us. If we tell the story a number of times it becomes embedding in what we know. As the story researcher Roger Schank said, “To tell a story is to remember.”

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So this should serve as a word of warning if you place a lot of faith in the registered mail system. It has changed my view. As soon as I finish this I am off to the post office to have a word with the postmaster.

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This morning, Shawn and I compared recent airline lounge experiences. Mine went a like this

One could argue that the Qantas staff member was being consistent (fair, equal) in her application of the rules. A good thing you might say, except that a very frequent traveller left with the resolve to travel VirginBlue in the future. In Shawn's case, the staff exercised some autonomy, weighed up the situation and decided to be flexible, whilst still making it clear that it was 'against the rules'. Which is the better example of customer service? It reminds me of my time in the Air Force where our mantra was "Rules are for the guidance of the wise and for the blind obedience of fools'.

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Some implications of this research.

Don't think you can provide nifty arguments to change people's minds. People will reason things away in whatever way they can and feel good in their answers regardless of how faulty the thinking.

Emotion has a large part to play in our decision making so we need to employ ways of connecting with people that are emotional, such as stories.

In a large change initiative you are just not going to get everyone accepting a new way of thinking or approaching things so it's important to work with those people who can take on the ideas and show the others it can be done.

Westen, D. 2007, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, PublicAffairs, New York.

Westen, D., Kilts, C., Blagov, P., Harenski, K., & Hamann, S. (2006). The neural basis of motivated reasoning: An fMRI study of emotional constraints on political judgment during the U.S. Presidential election of 2004. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 1947–1958.

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Most organisations I know have a set of stated values. You know what I mean, things like integrity, professionalism, respect for the individual. And in most cases they've been developed for the wrong reasons. And when developed for the right reasons, most employees don't understand what the values mean anyway. Let me explain.

Often the starting question for establishing a set of organisational values is, "Which values should we hold each and everyone accountable for so our organisation thrives?" This gets translated to "What values do our stakeholders (employees, customers, suppliers) expect us to hold?" The list is then drawn up and the result is a moribund list of words.

I was reading a paper by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras and they suggest an alternative set of questions (in my words): "What values do we deeply hold that reflect the essence of our company?" and "Would we still hold these values if they created a disadvantage for us if things changed?" If you can answer these two questions in the positive then you've identified your core values. What I found really interesting was looking at some examples Collins and Porras gave and noticed how each company held a different set in that the usual suspects weren't repeated: they didn't all have to value innovation, or customer service, or integrity. The lists I'm seeing are starting to look the same.

Sony

• Elevation of the Japanese culture and national status
• Being a pioneer - not following others; doing the impossible
• Encouraging individual ability and creativity

Merck

• Corporate social responsibility
• Unequivocal excellence in all aspects of the company
• Science-based innovation
• Honesty and integrity
• Profit, but profit from work that benefits humanity

Walt Disney

• No cynicism
• Nurturing and promulgation of "wholesome American values"
• Creativity, dreams, and imagination
• Fanatical attention to consistency and detail
• Preservation and control of the Disney magic

Collins and Porras' research shows that companies who have enduring values and a clear purpose out perform their competitors. But here's the thing, their core values are not chosen because they think they will be competitive advantages, rather they are chosen because they are held deeply by the core group. Art Kleiner, who wrote a terrific book on core group theory, makes the good point that "The organisation goes wherever its people perceive that the Core Group needs and wants to go. The organisation becomes whatever its people perceive and want to become." And this is double true for organisational values.

Values and meaning

When I worked at SMS (Australian consulting company) in the 90s we had three values: add value, maintain unity, enhance reputation. I knew what the 2nd and 3rd values meant but 'add value' was a bit fuzzy for me. Value fuzziness is a common problem. And you've probably guessed what I'm going to suggest as a way to provide meaning: that's right, STORIES.

Imagine if for every value everyone can tell one or more stories to illustrate what that values means. I often ask people to give me an example to illustrate a value and in many cases all I get is a very intense look of someone desperately trying to remember a story to tell. I've said it before but if a company values [insert value] then it should be teeming with [insert value] stories.

Tyco has worked this one out. Tyco is a global business involved in fire safety, security and manufacturing. A few years back they released a booklet called Doing the Right Thing: The Tyco Guide to Ethical Conduct . For each ethical guideline they included one or more stories that either illustrated what the ethical value means when it's working or what it looks liked when it is broken. For example, Tyco values safety and a healthy work environment and here are their stories of that value when it's broken.

At Anecdote we do a lot of work helping organisations find and tell the stories that illustrate their values and also help design systematic ways to embed those values throughout the consciousness of everyone in the organisation. It is only by working at this level of values and purpose can people make the best decision possible in a complex and dynamic environment. Rules don't cut it. And if we think about what really makes an organisation it's those thousands and thousands of decisions are made each and every day, each one guides by the values in action.

Collins, J.C. & Porras, J.I. 1996, 'Building Your Company's Vision', Harvard Business Review, vol. September-October, pp. 65-77.

Kleiner, A. 2003, Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success, Currency Doubleday, New York.

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Here are some thoughts/experiences from last week regarding anecdotes, how to elicit them and story-telling

• Last Wednesday I listened to Alana, an Aboriginal lady, tell a traditional teaching story and we chatted afterwards. In organisations we generally see stories morph over time, with details changing but much of the meaning being retained. Alana explained that this is not what happens with traditional aboriginal stories. She had been given permission to tell the story with the strict understanding that she would re-tell the story precisely as it had been told to her. By insisting on the exact reproduction of the story the meaning is much less likely to change over time and in this way knowledge can be passed faithfully from generation to generation.
• Shawn and I have the general view that 'how' and 'why' questions will normally elicit opinions and generalisations rather than anecdotes. 'When' and 'where' questions are generally better at generating experiences. Also on Wednesday, I heard a 'how' question that is fantastic to get anecdotes: 'How did you meet Grandma?' The great thing about this question is that it takes you to a very specific event and it can't help but result in an anecdote (unless Grandpa is in a grumpy mood).
A lady told me how she had been nearly hit by a Sydney Buses bus as she was on a roundabout. Instead of indicating he had made a mistake, the driver made a gesture that she interpreted as "tough cookies". Furious, she took down the bus number and by 4.30 that afternoon had sent an email to Sydney Buses complaining. By 9.30am the next day she had a response confirming that they expected high standards of driving behaviour and that the incident she described was unacceptable. They had identified the driver and organised to meet with him that day discuss the matter. She spoke very highly of Sydney Buses as a result, thought they were doing a good job. It goes to show, anger dissipates when people are listened to...

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There's a perception in business that stories are long and time consuming. "I don't have time to tell a story. I'm just going to give them the facts," I hear business folk say.

The reality is quite different. Every month or so I run a storytelling for leaders workshop. One of the first activities I often run is a jumpstart storytelling session. Each person has 90 seconds to tell their story and from my observation most people finish within a minute or even less. It doesn't take very long to tell a story. See for yourself. Check out the stories we've published here over the years, read them aloud and see how long they take.

Sure, there are the epic stories told by professional storytellers than can last for hours but business stories are mostly short.

This Johnnie Walker ad is a good example of a longer story you might hear in an organisation when someone is recounting the story of a project, a team or in this case, a company. Note how Robert Carlyle gives us the names of the people involved. We are interested in this type of detail and it's often omitted in business stories.

BTW, what did you think of the props? Did they distract you from the story or help build the picture?

Thanks to Terrence Garguilo and Kathy Hansen for finding the video

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Humans have a natural tendency to ascribe purpose and meaning to what we see even when there is very little to suggest it. As Brian Boyd says, "it is safer to mistake a twig for a snake than vice versa." ²

The same is true in the workplace. If the CEO arrives announced on your floor, and she rarely visits your part of the building, you will quickly piece together what you know to tell yourself a story that explains her visit: it's end of the quarter, she is in with one of the comms managers, she is probably getting her speech ready for the analysts' meeting. It's plausible. It puts your mind to rest so you get back to work. Then a colleague scurries over to your desk and says "there has been a major accident at the plant." You quickly reassess what you thought was happening with the CEO's visit and reformulate your story. The new story replaces the old.

Stories help us make sense of what's happening but we do have a tendency to overreact to over-interpret.

Leaders should be always thinking about their actions and what stories will people be telling themselves as a result of their actions.

1. Heider, F. and M. Simmel (1944). "An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior." The American Journal of Psychology 57(2): 243-259.

2. Boyd, B. (2009). On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction. Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 137.

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It took me a little while to work out what was happening. I snapped my first photo of the motor scooter with clip board attached in Soho but I only got a fleeting glance and then he was gone.

But my next sighting was far more informative. This time the motorcyclist was parked so I asked about the clipboard and what he was doing. It turned out he was learning to become a London taxi driver; he was learning was they call, "the knowledge."

It takes between 2 and 4 years to learn the 320 routes (they call them runs) required to pass the tests. The student is given 20 runs at a time to memorise and they ride their scooters along the routes remembering the vagaries of one-way streets and where the traffic jams happen, as well as the notable sights a tourist might want to see. The guy I was chatting to said the first 20 runs seem like a jumble but when you learn the next set of 20 patterns begin to emerge as one run partially coincides with another.

I've just finished reading Geoff Colvin's book, Talent is Overrated. His central theme (which I believe is shared by Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, which I haven't read yet), is that high performers are not merely naturally talented (and perhaps talent has little to do with it), but they also engage in deliberate practice. That is, they design and perform a program of activities focussed on developing specific skills. For these future black cabbies they were deliberately developing their navigation skills in the pursuit of passing a test and at the same time actually enlarging part of their brain.

In Colvin's book I was taken with the story of how Benjamin Franklin developed himself a program for improving his writing skills.

This has got me thinking about what would a program of deliberate practice for developing your storytelling skills look like. Any suggestions?

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I am working on a project requiring a major organisational transformation. On Monday, the division's chief heads off to Canberra to get a mandate to make the change from head office. One of his biggest concerns is head office continuously second-guessing him as he leads the organisation through the change process. He recognises that in complex situations there are no correct answers and there are likely to be many different opinions about what should be done, and head office has a habit of trying to micro-manage things.

I suggested using a story to demonstrate how head office second guessing might be fatal to the change process. This story from a BBC program 'The Human Mind' came to mind:

Relating the story to being second-guessed by head office might go like this. "Imagine if head office were there at that fire. There was no evidence that anything unusual was happening, the team were arguing against the chief (they wanted to stay and fight the fire) and they were making good progress. Chances are that head office would have overruled the fire chief and told him to keep fighting the fire, and the entire team would have been killed. And the head office decision would have been perfectly rational and the whole thing written off as a tragic accident."

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Something got me thinking about City of Port Phillip's Non Crime Hotline this morning. They have a phone number you call to report good news stories. I rang the council and found that Peter Strecker was now in charge of this initiative and he told me that it was in hibernation. It turned out that they got very few calls. There received some great stories,

But there wasn't enough to sustain the program. So why are we reluctant to share positive stories?

Perhaps part of the reason is that it's hard to see the impact sharing a positive story might have. When we tell the busker story we can see it's amusing and uplifting but perhaps not that instructional unless you're a busker. Whereas a negative story gives us a warning on what to avoid. Consequently we are only willing to exert a small effort to pass on positive stories and ringing a hotline and listening to a recorded message might be too much of an impost. If we were aggrieved in some way (a negative story) we probably have more energy to have our story heard and therefore more willing to jump through some hoops.

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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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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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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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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.

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/talkingheads/txt/s1711934.htm

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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?

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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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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 under way 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?

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.

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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A few weeks ago my youngest daughter was kidnapped by her school bus driver. Actually it wasn't just my daughter, it was every child on the bus that day.

It all started a few weeks before the kidnapping. Every day on the way home from school the bus would reach the first stop and one of the boys would ring the bell to get off. The bus would stop but no one got off. And every time this happened the bus driver would admonish the kids. His frustrations grew. The last time it happened before the kidnapping he cracked it and warned everyone on the bus that if it happened again he would lock the doors and not stop until he got to the end of the route--in some cases that meant the kids would be miles away from their homes.

Well, you know what happens. On that fateful day one of the boys rings the bell, no one gets off and the driver locks the doors and keeps driving. About half way to the end of the bus route, and many stops after my daughter's normal departure point, a mother was driving to the bus stop to pick up her child and noticed the wayward bus with her son in it. Starsky and Hutch style she cuts off the bus at the lights and the kids are released.

I was furious and rang the bus company, like all the other parents who had children on that bus, and spoke to the general manager, who apologised profusely and quite frankly said all the right things. Then I got thinking, how might one deal with this sort of situation using an intervention design approach like I use in organisation to help change behaviours. Obviously just yelling at the kids wasn't working so I thought, how about the silent treatment. What if the bus driver said to the kids that if the bell was rung and no one got off he would sit there for 10 minutes--calmly and quietly. Now this is where peer pressure comes into play. Ten minutes seems like an eternity to a kid and kids want to get home for afternoon tea (I did anyway). So after a while the kids would work it out for themselves and put pressure on the bell ringer to cut it out.

So I rang up the general manager again and told him my suggestion. He listened then told me all the reasons why this wouldn't work. Of course why would he take my advice? He doesn't know me, I'm not like him and as Nancy Dixon and Tom Gilmore describe in a recent post, I haven't earned the right to provide help.

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On that day when Adelaide's temperature reached 46.7C I was running a workshop for the spatial modelling and drafting community of practice. Their ritual is to have a BBQ for lunch, which seems a little crazy given the heat but that didn't stop us. We all retreated to air condition comfort to chow down on our lamb chops and snags.

Into my third bite I noticed an animated discussion between two of the engineers talking about their love for motor bikes. They'd worked out they both had an interest in German classics and one was describing a fuel tank issue he was having. Mid-conversation one of them jumped up to retrieve a motorcycle magazine to illustrate his point.

Then in an instant the conversation morphed into a description the magazine-wielding engineer was having with a fighter jet he was working on. He was facing an intractable maintenance issue that was causing him technical and political pain. They delved deeply into the issue. You could see that there was trust and respect in the conversation and this trust and respect was at least partially developed while discussing their hobby.

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Google and P&G are both known for their innovation capabilities and strict internal policy. Driven by market forces, they made an exception. They swapped about two-dozen staffers who spent weeks dipping into each other's staff training programs and sitting in on meetings where business plans get hammered out. This is terrific example of purposeful collaboration delivering results.

The Wall Street Journal reported that about a year ago, P&G's then global marketing officer, Jim Stengel, was concerned that one of the biggest initiatives in the company's laundry-soap history -- a switch to smaller bottles with a more concentrated formula -- didn't include enough of an online search-term marketing campaign. Google, on the other hand, was interested because they were keen to get a slice of P&G's $8.7 billion annual ad pie. (Read full article here.)

The opportunity to collaborate generated many tangible benefits for both companies. And that's not surprising because a collaboration experience can improve the level of conversation, energise teams and have a positive impact on the bottomline. This example illustrates three ways that companies can profit from a simple collaboration program.

1. Identify missed opportunities

In April, when actress Salma Hayek unveiled an ambitious promotion for P&G's Pampers brand, the Google team was stunned to learn that Pampers hadn't invited any "motherhood" bloggers -- women who run popular Web sites about child-rearing -- to attend the press conference. "Where are the bloggers?" asked a Google staffer in disbelief, according one person present. ...With mommy-bloggers, Pampers was quick to follow Google's advice. After failing to invite any to its April Pampers press conference, in July it invited a dozen or so to visit P&G's baby division in Cincinnati. The bloggers claim to have drawn anywhere from one-hundred thousand to six million visitors to their Web sites.

2. Learn how to embrace change

The big question that P&G grappled with was "How does a brand morph from one-way to two-way communication with the consumer?"

One of the first results of the collaboration was an online campaign inviting people to make spoof videos of P&G's "Talking Stain" TV ad and post them to YouTube... In the end, of the 227 spoofs submitted, a handful were deemed good enough by P&G to air on TV. The campaign was successful enough that Tide plans to use more consumer-generated content in the future, P&G says.

3. Understand each others' language

Google job-swappers have started adopting P&G's lingo. During a session on evaluating in-store displays, a P&G marketer described the company's standard method, known as "stop, hold, close": Product packaging first needs to "stop" a shopper, Mr. Lichtig said. "Hold" is a pause to read the label, and "close" is when a shopper puts the product in the cart. Google's Ms. Chudy gasped. "This is just like our text ads," she said. The headline is the "stop," its description is the "hold" and the "close" is clicking through to the Web site. "This is going to get so much easier, now that I'm learning their language," she said.

External collaboration can have many advantages. The biggest being that it allows new ideas and disciplines to enter the organization, some (or most) of which challenge the status quo of practices, processes and the way the industry works.

Something to think about:

• How can you profit from collaboration?
• Who are the people you can invite to collaborate with?
• What will be your first step to getting started?

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Many posts ago, we shared the example of the Ritz Carlton demonstrating that 'A company that values customer service should be teeming with customer service stories'.

Here's another living example: Sparkspace
They have created a dedicated blog to record remarkable customer service. This is how they started with the idea.

We've challenged our company to create 100 customer service "sparks" over 100 days. The sparks can be simple gestures or grand WOW experiences. The catch is that they must be something we may not have done before this challenge.

Isn't it just a wonderful way to engage staff in doing the right thing and inspiring good action (through stories of their colleagues). And this can be so easy to implement.

Not a bad challenge to start the new year with!

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When I was at IBM leading the software services group in Melbourne I suggested in one of our leadership meetings that we should introduce a set of group-based incentives. I was howled down and accused of being a communist. I'm not kidding. While I know fact, data and rationale alone cannot persuade someone to change their mind (and if not used carefully can reinforce the status quo - see the confirmation bias), I'd wish I'd known about this study described in Keith Sawyer's book, Group Genius.

Sawyer, K. (2007). Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. New York, Basic Books.

Wageman, R. (1995). "Interdependence and Group Effectiveness." Administrative Science Quarterly 40: 145-180.

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Humans have a strong sense of fairness. If two people are given a sum of money and one is asked to divide it and offer the other portion to their partner, if it's not a 50/50 split the partner is most likely to refuse offer, even if this means that both parties loose everything. And of course when it's hard to really to split something exactly down the middle (like a piece of chocolate forest cake) then the you-cut-I-choose method is the only fair approach. Interestingly if a computer makes the split people are most likely to accept whatever proportion that's offered. We don't expect computers to be fair. So don't fall for the lame excuse of, "the computer says no." They're just playing with your psychological foibles.

This sense of fairness has a strong bearing on how we rate our satisfaction with our collaborators, and therefore the collaboration's long-term success. We care more about the process of fairness than the outcome. In one study of car dealers and their relationship with the car manufacturer, the biggest factors in satisfaction were not the transactional details of inventory quality or how good a deal they were getting but how the manufacturer behaved towards the dealer. Did they take the time to learn about their unique operation and market, were they treated with respect, were they polite and well mannered?

Small things can make a big difference. In the middle of this year we started a project for a client and like for all of our clients we offer a 10% discount if the full amount is paid before we start (it usually happens about the same time as we start). This client took advantage of this discount but somewhere along the way our invoice was lost in their system and we were a month into the project without payment. I mentioned this to our client and he was embarrassed and immediately offered to pay the additional 10% because his company didn't fulfil their end of the bargain. Immediately our rapport was strengthened.

Treating everyone fairly is not just the right thing to do, it will determine the long-term success of your collaboration.

I was reminded of the money splitting experiment this morning reading Sway: The Irresistable Pull of Irrational Behaviour. They also tell the car dealer story. It's an excellent little book. Here are the papers describing the research.

Guth, W., R. Schmittberger, et al. (1982). "An Experimental Analysis of Ultimatum Bargaining." Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 3: 367-88.

Kumar, N., L. Scheer, et al. (1995). "The Effects of Supplier Fairness on Vulnerable Resellers." Journal of Marketing Research 32: 54-65.

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Scientists in Iowa recently reported a breakthrough discovery. They successfully identified the gene (PRICKLE1) which when mutated causes epilepsy. There's two things amazing about this discovery

• PRICKLE1 is unique in that it has never been associated with any other disease.
• The project involved two dozen institutions across 6 countries and collaboration played an important role.

Dr Bassuk (the lead author) found that whether on-campus or international, collaboration was essential to the success of the research study.

"By sharing and analyzing data sets, we realized there was a common mutation in the PRICKLE1 gene in the family members with this form of epilepsy," Bassuk said.

To verify that the mutation might be related to the epilepsy, the team needed to test it in an animal model. This next step to find a suitable animal model involved a surprising coincidence: Bassuk, who had only recently joined the UI, realized through online research that the PRICKLE1 gene in zebrafish had been previously identified by another University of Iowa researcher, Diane Slusarki, Ph.D., associate professor of biology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

"I walked across the river to Diane's side of campus, and we designed an experiment to test the human mutation in the zebrafish," Bassuk said. It was 'Iowa luck.'"...

"We never could have done, or could continue to do this type of research, with just one person thinking about it," he said. "From the clinicians who found and took histories on the study participants, to antibody testing at Stanford University to DNA shared from colleagues in Japan, the study required a lot of collaboration and coordination..."

Read full story here.

What is it that makes it easy for scientists to collaborate?

• Passion or an area of expertise they are identified with
• Dealing with the unknown - so you know you don't have all the answers
• Knowing who would be interested/can be contacted
• Ability to connect easily - they all have profile pages these days and publish their work

Are there other factors?

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Last Friday I ran a workshop for a client on collaboration. I emphasised collaborative practices and behaviours and at one point I introduced the idea of gaining agreement from their team to "call me on it." As I was describing this idea I noticed a woman sitting up the back shaking her head, her face flushed with annoyance. So I stopped and asked if she would like to make a comment.

"There is no way in the world I could ever call my boss on anything, let alone his behaviour," she said. "Can you tell me exactly how you would do that?"

Before I could answer she continued by saying, "I once told my manager he was behaving badly and in the end I had to resign."

At the end of the workshop I was thinking about what this woman said and how one memorable experience created a belief so strong that it precluded a set of strategies for better collaboration. She was describing what Umberto Eco calls our background books: the stories we tell ourselves that enable and disable us.

I could see where she was coming from and I imagine that her encounter with her manager might have been like my equally unsuccessful one with a branch manager a decade ago. I was working for a management consulting company in Canberra and was one of the first eight employees in the branch. We grew in size and when the first set of leadership roles were announced my name was missing from the list. I was furious. I dwelt on it for about a week without mentioning my fury to anybody at work until one day I was in the office kitchen and the branch manager waltzed in.

"I can't believe was you did. Don't you think I'm good enough for a leadership role?" I blurted out.

And before he could answer I stormed out of the kitchen.

I'm not proud of what I did. And it did spell the end of my time with that company. But looking back at that incident I realise now that I wasn't equipped with the skills to have that conversation. I was unaware of how to conduct a meaningful dialogue and keep the conversation going. Happily things have changed and now I have the privilege of helping others learn these fundamental collaboration practices.

Here is a story told by Umberto Eco illustrating his point about background books.

"All medieval tradition convinced Europeans of the existence of the unicorn, an animal that looked like a gentle and slender white horse with a horn on its muzzle. Because it was increasingly difficult to come upon unicorns in Europe (indeed, according to analytic philosophers, they do not exist, although I am note sure I agree), tradition decided that unicorns were living in exotic countries, such as the kingdom of Prester John in Ethiopia.

When Marco Polo travelled to China, he was obviously looking for unicorns. Marco Polo was a merchant, not an intellectual, and moreover, when he started travelling, he was too young to have read many books. But he certainly knew all the legends current in his time about exotic countries, so he was prepared to encounter unicorns, and he looked for them. On his way home, in Java, he saw some animals that resembled unicorns, because they had a single horn on their muzzles, and because an entire tradition had prepared him to see unicorns, he identified these animals as unicorns. But because he was naïve and honest, he could not refrain from telling the truth. And the truth was that the unicorns he saw were very different from those represented by a millennial tradition. They were not white but black. They had pelts like buffalo, and their hooves were as big as elephants’. Their horns, too, were not white but black, their tongues were spiky, and their heads looked like wild boars’. In fact, what Marco Polo saw was the rhinoceros.

We cannot say Marco Polo lied. He told the simple truth, namely, that unicorns were not the gentle beasts people believe them to be. But he was unable to say he had found new and uncommon animals; instinctively, he tried to identify them with a well-known image. Cognitive science would say that he was determined by a cognitive model. He was unable to speak about the unknown but could only refer to what he already knew and expected to meet. He was a victim of his background books."

Eco, U. (1998). Serendipities: Language and Lunacy . London, Phoenix. pp 71-72.

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I was in Singapore last week helping a group of leaders learn how to find and tell their own stories. No templates, no recipes, just helping them become mindful of their own stories and showing that storytelling is a visual practice. Don't try and remember the words of a story, remember the pictures.

Like many of these sessions some people were naturals and others found it difficult to move from a didactic approach to communicating. There was one gentleman from India who I could tell was struggling. Luckily he was teamed up with a woman from Japan who really understood the idea of personal stories. At the end of the workshop he came up to me and thanked me for the day and said, "I can see how important telling your stories is because I have just seen you change the mood of the group and build a rapport with all of us by simply telling your stories. That's what I will take away with me today."

I was reminded of last week's workshop (stories beget stories) watching this short video of Barack Obama out on the hustings. He tells the story of how he came to use the chant: Fired up; ready to go. To key to good storytelling is detail, detail, detail and painting pictures for the audience's minds eye. How do you feel at the end of this story?

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A couple of years ago I spoke at a BHP Billiton planning day. My talk was at the end of the day so I sat up the back and listened to all the other speakers. While listening I was struck by the language the BHP Billiton people used: "we need to turbo charge the process, turn the cogs, grease the wheels, dig deeper ..." The dominant metaphor was that of a machine. I mentioned this to them in my talk and made the point that organisations can become trapped by the metaphors they use. If you view your organisation and its issues as a machine you will only devise machine-based responses.

After this experience I kept a keen ear out for dominant metaphors in other companies and discovered a bunch of examples: an investment bank where gambling was the major metaphor: let's roll the dice, we came up trumps, what are the odds ...; a road traffic authority that, you guessed it, uses road metaphors: we've got a green light, this is just one way traffic, we have a clear road map ...

Are you aware of the dominant metaphor in play at your organisation?

To help you get started identifying metaphors, Gabe Mounce has written an article called Metaphors are Mindfunnels with a couple of colleagues in the US Airforce. It reviews George Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By and is a good introduction to the issues. You can find a link to the article at Gabe's blog post.

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Many (most?) of our conversations in the workplace are transactional: in fact they are not conversations at all. In the October issue of Anecdotally, we shared a technique to encourage people to have conversations.

Here's a nice success story about how a culture was created where people have conversations.

"The London office was horrible", a senior manager told us, "with constant backbiting and a lot of bad blood''. The change started with Charlotte Beers, the then CEO of OgilvyOne, who invited all the business leaders to a two-day off-site meeting. Breaking with norms, she began the conversation by asking direct questions: "How do we feel about one another? Why can't we work together? Do we recognise what that is doing to our clients?'' That meeting was the turning point. Initially, the discussions were very difficult. "We simply did not know how to openly talk to each other", the same senior manager told us. "We were so used to being defensive and polite. It took two years and eight meetings - and some changes in the cast of characters - before we learnt to deal with emotions and feelings, to be authentic. Its only through that process that we learnt the power of friendship".

Gratton L., and Ghoshal S., (2002) "Improving the Quality of Conversations", Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 209-223.

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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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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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Marketing folk confuse me sometimes. For example, they talk about brand stories yet they forget the story bit.

For example, if you Google the phrase "brand story" the top hit is a blog post by Mark Thomson. Reading his post you'd be forgiven for thinking stories are superfluous to crafting a brand story because while he uses the word 'story,' often actually, he doesn't explain what he means by a story nor give any examples of brand stories. His advice is to be clear, consistent and give it a bit a flair. A nicely formatted set of dot points could meet his criteria for a brand story.

Let me show you a brand story and then I'll share with you why so many marketers, journalists, and political spin doctors talk about narrative but don't appear to really get it.

At a minimum stories are set in a time (at the turn of the century, three months ago, in 1996, when I visited Grandma, a long, long time ago—you get the idea) and events happen which are linked together inferring causes and effects. If you haven't got these two basic features—a time when things happened and things actually happening—you don't have a story. And these features are merely the pre-requisite. Having them certainly doesn't guarantee a compelling story.

I'm surprised how many people talk about stories yet can't actually determine whether stories are present or missing. I'd say about half of the people attending our storytelling courses are confused about what a story actually is and it's one of the things we spend a good amount of time to ensure everyone's got it. Without this understanding you can't work with stories.

Even our very best political journalists seem confused. Here's Michelle Gratton, political editor for The Age newspaper said recently:

Having a "narrative" — which is just a sexy and fashionable way of saying a government should present what it is up to in an overall framework — gives people the feeling their leaders know what they're doing, and that the ends of policy are both worthwhile and consistent with the means. (That is, of course, provided the narrative is convincing.)

And here's ANZ's chief economist, Saul Eslake, suggested narrative (according to Michelle) for the Rudd government.

"If I were advising the Government, I'd be trying to say that there are some downside risks as a result of global factors; that because of this inflation is likely to fade away; that the budget had got the balance right; that if things got worse, it has the funds to ease fiscal policy," Eslake says.

"It could also say that Australians are exposed to the international credit crunch not because banks are up to their gills in dodgy mortgages, as in the US and Europe, but because we have a huge current account deficit — and that we want to address that through better productivity, skills and other reforms including tax reform."

Saul's suggested narrative are merely a string of ideas. You could craft a story from Saul's ideas but in themselves are far from a narrative.

When someone asks me about Anecdote I tell versions of this story.

Ever since Isaac Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687 people have viewed the world around them as measured, predictable and conforming to defined laws of physics. The world is a machine and we only need to understand how that machine works so we can optimise each part.

Fredrick Taylor introduced Newton’s mechanical perspective to business in the 1880s and 90s. Taylor strongly believed that well defined procedures executed with precision was the best way to run a business. His ideas took off and this mechanical view of the firm dominated business thinking for the last 120 years. It worked remarkably well.

Since the industrial revolution we have seen things speed up and the information revolution has seen the world become more connected with changes accelerating every day. The 21st century, however, marks a tipping point where the mechanical view begins to falter. We need new ways to conceive the way businesses work that reflect their complexity and their essential human nature.

In 2004 we started Anecdote in the belief there was a new way to conceive of work that was organic, human-centred and reflected the complexity every business experiences in the 21st century. So we set about developing techniques and tools based on stories, a uniquely human faculty, designed to facilitate change more effectively, foster learning and collaboration and advance the natural leadership capabilities that exists in every organisation.

We believe this human-centred approach marks the future of organisations. There is still a long way to go because the majority of businesses still work on the basis that they are a machine with levers to pull, wheels to turn and cogs to grease.

The thing is, it's not the only story we tell that helps people understand who we are and what we stand for. There isn't a single brand story rather organisations should have a repertoire of brand stories that everyone knows and can tell.

My guess is that marketers, advertising agents and political Hollowmen use the term 'story' and 'narrative' so often that there is a belief that everyone knows what it means but only a subset of the group actually get it and the rest are too frightened to admit their ignorance.

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I spent a fair bit of Thursday at the Melcrum Strategic Communications Summit in Sydney, where one of our clients was presenting on the use of narrative in their manager development program, exploring their OCI results and embedding their new corporate values.

One of the other speakers told how their CEO started blogging internally (at the behest of the comms team). Initially, much of the blog content was written by the comms team...and surprise, surprise, no-one took any notice. It wasn't until the CEO started blogging about things like how he spent his weekend (at the Saints game with his son) that staff started reading his blog. The speaker correctly identified that people are not interested in the 'corporate speak' on the blog - it just isn't credible. And that it felt a little dishonest having the content done by the comms team.

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Do you remember where you were when you first saw the those two jumbo jets plunge into the World Trade Center? How well do you remember what you were doing when you saw it? Can you remember the room you were in, the people in the room with you, what you said, what you thought?

When strong emotions surge through us our bodies respond by pumping adrenalin into our blood stream. In addition to preparing us to run or fight, adrenalin enhances our memories of what was happening when the emotion hit. This biological response was probably a very good feature of our species in times past because you want to remember exactly where that T-rex, that scared the bejesus out of you, hangs out.

Stories create emotions too and therefore there's no surprise that we remember the best stories, they ones that touch our hearts, make us laugh or even just create a feeling of puzzlement.

Last week I was teaching our storytelling for business leaders workshop to an energy company and I started the day with a Jumpstart Storytelling session. One of the most popular stories was this one which was originally told by a CEO many years ago but remembered clearly by the participant.

In prehistoric times there was this family that lived in a cave. They were very happy in their cave. They led a good life but one day they noticed across the valley another cave that looked pretty good. So after many weeks of discussion they made their mind up to move to the new cave. As they crossed the valley they noticed just how rich the soil was and thought it would be even better to settle there and till the soil. Which they did.

The CEO never explained the story nor mentioned it again, but the discussion it started about what it meant continued for years.

Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman say stories are facts wrapped up in context and delivered with emotion. The three factors are equally important: fact, context, emotion. But emotion is often set aside in a business context and we are only now seeing its inclusion as a legitimate factor to consider.

The relationship between emotion and memory was first brought to me attention in Maxwell and Dickman's book, The Elements of Persuasion

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My friend Jackie hated having Nancy as her manager. She thought her to be cold, insensitive and overbearing and had, in the past, tried twice to get transferred to another department, but to no avail. Nancy was apparently a favorite with her employers, and since Jackie was both new to the area and the job, she felt she had no strings to pull. This only served to irritate her more.

Then one evening while she was working late to finish up a quarterly report, Jackie felt suddenly sick to her stomach and was on her way to the restroom when she collapsed in the hall. The next thing she knew she was being placed on a gurney and wheeled out to a waiting ambulance. In the sea of faces hovering over her, the only one she recognized was Nancy's, and in the blur of activity, she could feel Nancy squeeze her hand and hear her say, "Don't worry, Jackie, I'm here. I won't leave you."

It was a promise Nancy kept. Over the next few days as Jackie, a newly divorced mother of two, lay in a hospital bed, coming to terms with the damage done by the stroke she had suffered. Nancy not only stopped by to see her two and three times a day, offering never-ending words of encouragement and bringing mail and get-well messages from co-workers, but also stepped in to see that Jackie's two daughters were cared for and that every aspect of Jackie's life was kept running as smoothly as possible in her absence.

When it was necessary for Jackie to leave the hospital and be placed in a rehabilitation facility, Nancy again made all of the arrangements and visited daily, and when Jackie was finally allowed to go home, it was Nancy who made it possible for her to travel to and from physical therapy each day until she was, at last, fully recovered and able to return to work.

By the time I met the two women, over a decade had passed. They still worked for the same company, though Nancy was about to retire, and Jackie was now the manager of her own department, a promotion she had earned the year following her life-changing stroke. It was obvious to everyone that the two women were the best of friends. I was a new hire for the company and learned about their history together when they invited me to lunch.

At Nancy's retirement party a couple of weeks later, I was standing next to Jackie as her dear friend was receiving accolades from the rest of her co-workers. Jackie looked at her and then whispered to me, "Can you believe I used to hate that woman? And if it wasn't for her, I'd probably be dead. Goes to show we never know who among us is an angel, doesn't it?"

None of us really knows about the people we decide to hate. We label them wrong and ourselves right and in so doing never realize that we are building a wall of separation that only grows stronger with time. We truly do block the angels from our midst. It is not until circumstance throws us together, as it did Jackie and Nancy, that we realize how very much we need one another and how very alike we truly are.

As a young girl living with my grandmother, any time I criticized another person in her presence, she would ask to see whose shoes I was wearing, a blunt reminder that unless I'd walked in that person's shoes, I had no right to judge. It was also a signal that I should stop talking and start thinking differently.

Even today, I sometimes catch myself looking down at my feet when I feel tempted to criticize. "Who am I to judge?" I'll ask myself in the next breath, realizing as I do that I have no idea what the target of my critical focus is really going through.

Of course, that doesn't always stop me, and sometimes the judgment tumbles into my thoughts or words and takes up residence before I even notice. But through my own self-experimenting, I have noticed that when I succeed in suspending judgment and allowing myself to look at others from another perspective, my joy increases. Judging others, I have discovered, does not let joy in. Stepping away from judgment does.

In the long run, all judging others really does is bring pain and block us from our ability to offer love. We were born to give, to bless, and to be a blessing, but when we are sitting in judgment, we can't. As Mother Teresa pointed out, when we are judging others, we have no time to love them. It is only in suspending judgment that we open our hearts to unconditional love and empower ourselves and each other to be the best that we can be.

An Excerpt from "May You Be Blessed"" by Kate Nowak

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A company that values customer service should be teeming with customer service stories. But what do you do if this is not the case? The Ritz-Carlton has developed a narrative-based approach for ensuring customer service is in the minds of all their people. It was described in this Business Week article but I first discovered it reading Maxwell and Dickman's The Elements of Persuasion. This is what the Ritz-Carlton has done.

Everyone in the company is encouraged to submit stories of RC people going above and beyond. Each week a story is selected and sent out to all the RC hotels around the world and this story is read out at the Line Up meetings, the gathering of staff before starting a shift. Here's an example of one of these stories as told by Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman, which RC call their WOW stories.

Like a lot of good stories, it starts on a dark and windy night. In this case, a blustery February when the downstairs bar that Fran tends was largely deserted. "The only one in the room was an older gentlemen, the sort of executive that has been drinking the same scotch for the last fifty years." A young, good-looking couple--we'll call them Dick and Jane-- came in dressed in laua shirts despite the weather and ordered mai tais. They seemed a little morose, but Fran is the sort of bartender who can get anyone to open up, and soon they told their story. Dick and Jane had just been married. They had always planned to honeymoon at the Ritz-Carlton in Kapalua, Hawaii. In fact, they had a reservation already booked for six months in the future, but Dick had just been diagnosed with cancer--a particularly nasty form of Hodgkin's lymphoma--so they pushed the date forward and were in L.A. for chemotherapy. This might be as close to Hawaii as they ever got, so they were bravely trying to make the most of it. When Fran tells the story, at this point her eyes take on that slightly stunned look that comes to cancer patients as they struggle to find the right balance between hope and denial. Obviously, the couple's story touched her deeply.

Fran got someone to cover the bar and sprang into action. She found Don Quimby, the manager on duty and together they went to the banquet hall prop room and collected anything that reminded them of Hawaii--a fishing net, a collection of starfish and seashells, a poster of Hawaiian hula dancers at a luau--and quickly gave the couple's room a make over. They even filled a cooler with sand and stuck in a sign that read "Dick and Jane's Private Beach." Then Don found an electronic key from the Ritz at Kapalua that a previous guest had left behind by mistake and reprogrammed it so it worked on Dick and Jane's room door. Don put on a Hawaiian shirt and went out to deliver this new key to them. He led them to their "new Hawaiian Honeymoon Suite," where a complimentary bottle of Champaign was waiting. And for the next three days staff of the hotel did everything it could think of to make the couple feel like they were on a Hawaiian honeymoon of a lifetime.

Three times a week staff recount WOW stories in the Line Ups, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Each time a WOW story is told it triggers a conversation about what everyone sees as significant in the story and often prompts the retelling of other stories of things that have happened in their own hotel. So rather than receive a corporate directive on how to behave staff vicariously experience behaviour that everyone recognises as exemplary.

You receive a $100 if your story is selected and at the end of the year there is a competition to select the top 10 stories.

This approach has many of the features of Most Significant Change except that the conversation around the stories happens at the coal face rather than among the decision makers. Mind you, someone in HQ is selecting the stories and this process could be expanded to include a MSC style selection process with the decision makers.

If done well your organisation would definitely be teeming with values in action stories.

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It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation Might satisfy his mind.

The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
"God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!"

The Second, feeling of the tusk
Cried, "Ho! what have we here,
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me 'tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!"

The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up he spake:
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a snake!"

The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee:
"What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain," quoth he;
"'Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!"

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: "E'en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!"

The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Than, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope.
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a rope!"

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

by American poet, John Godfrey Saxe (1816-97)

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Here is one of the stories I heard at KM Australia as told by John Girard.

On a foggy autumn day nearly 800 years ago a traveller happened upon a large group of workers adjacent to the River Avon. Despite being tardy for an important rendezvous curiosity convinced the traveller that he should inquire about their work. With a slight detour he moved toward the first of the three tradesmen and said “my dear fellow what is it that you are doing?” The man continued his work and grumbled, “I am cutting stones.” Realising that the mason did not wish to engage in a conversation the traveller moved toward the second of the three and repeated the question. To the traveller’s delight this time the man stopped his work, ever so briefly, and stated that he was a stonecutter. He then added “I came to Salisbury from the north to work but as soon as I earn ten quid I will return home.” The traveller thanked the second mason, wished him a safe journey home and began to head to the third of the trio.

When he reached the third worker he once again asked the original question. This time the worker paused, glanced at the traveller until they made eye contact and then looked skyward drawing the traveller’s eyes upward. The third mason replied, “I am a mason and I am building a cathedral.” He continued, “I have journeyed many miles to be part of the team that is constructing this magnificent cathedral. I have spent many months away from my family and I miss them dearly. However, I know how important Salisbury Cathedral will be one day and I know how many people will find sanctuary and solace here. I know this because the Bishop once told me his vision for this great place. He described how people would come from all parts to worship here. He also told that the Cathedral would not be completed in our days but that the future depends on our hard work.” He paused and then said, “So I am prepared to be away from my family because I know it is the right thing to do. I hope that one day my son will continue in my footsteps and perhaps even his son if need be.”

Girard J.P. and Lambert S (2007) “The Story of Knowledge: Writing Stories that Guide Organisations into the Future” The Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management Volume 5 Issue 2, pp 161-172.

In the topic of writing future stories my personal preference is to help people find real stories that reflect where they would like to be in the future. I find that when people write fictitious future stories there is excitement and engagement while they write them, which is a good thing, but when the stories are revisited weeks later people look at each other askance and wonder what drugs people were on.

This type of story is in another category. It's one that might help to break a mindset and get a group thinking more aspirationally.

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Deborah May provided the following account in her recent newsletter.

Most leaders want to engage their team in planning processes but don't always do so effectively.

Recently I facilitated a session with a group of executives. The conversation was lively, the questions were thought provoking and we ultimately developed a decent plan for the future. Unfortunately, the CEO's need to control the outcome limited the value of the session and dampened his team's enthusiasm and confidence in the future. The CEO was well intentioned. He asked his team to come up with ideas and told them that he would just listen. This was welcomed. Too frequently he dominated the meetings and limited the contribution of his team. Ideas began to flow, discussion was animated and there was a sense of possibility and excitement in the room. The conversation was still lively when the CEO somewhat petulantly ended the meeting when he said that he'd heard most of it before, they didn't come up with anything new and the meeting had been a waste of time. The animation ceased, the mood changed, energy dissipated and people looked embarrassed. I was bemused, however, and gathered the notes from the meeting, confident that there'd been many good ideas generated that could be harnessed and used. I later found out that the CEO had wanted his team to adopt a particular strategy he'd articulated at a prior meeting. He was so focused on his own idea he had failed to listen to others. When I shared the outcomes of the meeting with him later, he was decent enough to admit he'd been too rash in dismissing the meeting as a waste of time. Unfortunately he was not quite able to articulate his error of judgement to his team. Your role as a leader is to enlist followers and engage the hearts, minds and resources of the whole organisation to achieve something compelling - and then get out of the way. Leaders who are too directive and don't let go, lose not only great ideas but eventually the people as well.

I am sure I have been to that same meeting. The one where the convenor purports to listen but in reality only wants to convince people to do something they have already decided. Professor Brenda Dervin said "anger dissipates when people are listened to". I think the converse is also true. We need to learn from examples such as the one above. If only we could apply the 'law of two feet' from Open Space Technology when we find ourselves in sessions like this.

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I'm thoroughly enjoying reading Influencer at the moment and the story of Dr Everett Rogers grabbed my attention. After finishing his PhD his first job was to help Iowa farmers adopt a new strain of corn which promised much higher yields. He spoke to many farmers and couldn't get a single one to try out the new strain. They just didn't trust this researcher who was so different from the farmers. He was a city slicker who was naive about farming practice, so what would he know.

Dr Rogers persisted thinking, if only he could get one farmer to try it out and then they could influence everyone else. After a time he did find someone to try out the new corn, a hipster dude who wore Bermuda shorts and fancy sunglasses. He enjoyed a bumper crop but the other farmers were unimpressed. This maverick farmer derided their way of life, he was an outsider and there was no way they were going to adopt anything from a Bermuda short wearing weirdo.

This failure springboarded Dr Rogers into a career of studying why good ideas are not adopted.

"Rogers learned that the first people to latch onto a new idea are unlike the masses in many ways. He called these people innovators. They're the guys and gals in Bermuda shorts. They tend to be open to new ideas and smarter than average. But here's the important point. The key to getting the majority of any population to a adopt a vital behavior is to find out who these innovators are and avoid them like the plague. If they embrace your new ideas, it will surely die."

It turns out it is a much better strategy to get on board the early adopters, the opinion leaders (about 14% of the population). Mind you if the opinion leaders don't like your idea, then you are sunk.

The book suggests the best way to find the opinion leaders is to ask everyone to list the people who they believe are most influential and trusted. When the same names keep being suggested (perhaps 10 times) they are the opinion leaders. I wonder about the practicality of getting this list made. Would it be done as a survey? A social network analysis survey would find this information as well as uncover those people who are most connected.

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Smart people hate being told what to do. In many of our projects we see the 'head office pattern' where HO is seen as a sort of 'Big Brother' (in the Orwellian sense) and not really trusted. This can often be caused by HO wanting to control things and, often unintentionally, alienating the very people they are seeking to influence. "We want people to work more collaboratively, and here's how we want you to do it!" Of course, if HO wants to see more collaboration across the organisation, they must behave in a collaborative manner and not impose their will in the expectation of compliance.

The following is a microcosm of the HO pattern.....

In 2005 I was working in a change project. The project team were the 'head office' representatives. One of the team asked for my feedback on a meeting agenda he was putting together for a group of key business stakeholders. I read the first bullet point on his PowerPoint slide and told him ... "if I received this from you I wouldn't attend".

He was taken aback till I explained that his first bullet point was 'to agree on the XYZ model' and that he had obviously made up his mind what he wanted to do and he appeared to be planning to spend the meeting trying to convince people that what he had already decided was correct. I suggested he change the agenda item to read 'discuss the pros and cons of adopting the XYZ model'. He immediately understood that this creates an entirely different mindset and he later reported that the meeting was quite productive.

To tackle the head office pattern we need to be constantly aware of our language, motivations and most importantly, our behaviour. Get your messages proof-read, 'call' the 'head office mindset' when you see it and think about what you are trying to achieve and whether it is genuine. If it isn't genuine, be assured that your stakeholders will notice even though they mightn't say anything about it.

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The building in the left foreground of the image is the historic Hyde Park Barracks Museum in Sydney. The building at the back behind the tree is an extension to the equally historic NSW Lands Department building (right of shot). Apparently there was great care taken and no expense spared to ensure that the brickwork of the extension was an exact match for the brickwork on the Hyde Park Barracks building. "Not very successful" I hear you cry! The story goes that after the extension was completed some bright spark decided to steam clean the brickwork on Hyde Park Barracks, revealing the true colour of the brickwork and leaving the unsightly mismatch shown in the photo.

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Every organization has a set of values, most even live by them, but how many have successfully embedded the right behaviours that reflect those values every day?
This weekend I read an interesting anecdote in What the customer wants you to know that led me to think about this.

A senior manager of a financial services organization shares his experience with the author.

“I went around and I asked everybody I saw what were their great achievements in the last year. And not one person’s answer included the word ‘customer,’” he says. “There was stuff about ‘I integrated twelve products into one’ or ‘we migrated this to that’ or ‘we had four products’ and ‘we hit this target or that target.’ But not one person mentioned the customer.”

A business where stories about customer satisfaction or success don’t emerge naturally could indicate potential trouble. This anecdote is a good reminder and example of how stories can be used to assess behaviours at work.

Encouraging stories to emerge constantly and looking out for patterns in these stories could help managers to detect both changing customer needs and the ability of staff to respond to the customer.

When was the last time you heard or told a great customer story?

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There was a boy who was born without a right arm. On his ninth birthday he asked his parents if he could join a karate club. They were delighted by the idea and the boy quickly became a regular at the local dojo. The boy wanted to compete in a tournament and asked his master if this was possible. The master said he could but only if he listened carefully to his master and trusted him.

The master taught the boy one move and one move only. The boy practised it diligently but after a while he was worried that the other boys were learning a range of moves and he only had one. He asked the master to teach him other moves but the master said no. The master just urged the boy to keep practising that one move.

The boy won the first round of the tournament and then the next round and the one after that until he found himself winning the entire tournament. The boy was baffled. How did he do it? He asked the master how a boy with only one arm and only one move could win a karate tournament against these other boys. The master smiled and told the boy that there is only one defence against the move the boy learned and that defence involves grabbing the attacker by the right arm.

I believe this is a Zen teaching story. It was told to me by Pavan Choudary. I spent two days with Pavan and a terrific group of creative people at Conversations that Create. Pavan has recently launched his book, When you are sinking, become a submarine. Pavan is an inspirational and fascinating fellow and if his book is anything like the wonderful conversations we had, it will be well worth getting a copy.

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"Not that old chestnut" I hear you cry.

We have written a whitepaper on this subject and blogged on it a few times. It keeps the KM list serves across the planet pre-occupied for a few months each year.

I recently had coffee with a client to get an update on the implementation of the knowledge strategy we did for them a while back. The client described good progress in many areas but highlighted one of the things holding them back was the continuing confusion/uncertainty about the difference between information management and knowledge management. This was despite an extensive education campaign to get a consistent 'language' in place across the organisation on order to minimise the roadblocks to implementation.

This reinforced to me that we should just stop 'pushing the proverbial up a hill' on this one. My suggestion to the client was to stop talking about knowledge management. It is much easier to grasp concepts like 'better information management' on the one hand, and 'improved collaboration and learning' on the other. This conception makes it much clearer that there is a big 'people' and 'process/practice' component to the task.

Knowledge strategy = Information Management + [Collaboration and Learning]

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Last week Melbourne was witness to our taxi drivers protesting in the city streets against their poor working conditions. The protest was sparked by the fatal stabbing of a fellow taxi driver. Among a range of improvements, the drivers wanted taxi owners to make available security screens that wrap around their driver's seat.

This week I was in Sydney and Daryl reminded me that taxis there were once big users of driver security screens but they're rarely seen these days. We have also noticed a marked improvement in the quality of Sydney taxis over the last couple of years. So when we jumped into a cab we asked the driver why the screens had disappeared.

The driver knew exactly what had changed. "A couple of years ago some new legislation was brought in that enabled taxi drivers to refuse a fare," he said. "Now we choose who gets into our cab and as a result violence has dropped. We also know if a single, male passenger, wearing a cap (to shield his face from the in-car security camera) jumps into the back seat, it's likely to be trouble, and we tell them to get out."

According to this cabbie, this one intervention has made the big impact on driver security.

I wonder why Melbourne is not learning the lessons from Sydney?

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Every month, the Australian Institute of Management publishes its magazine 'Management Today'. The back page (p56) of the May 2008 edition has some comments about diversity including the following anecdote:

"I had to ask for some time off for a family matter and I think my manager really resented it"

Compare this to an anecdote we recently collected from one of the companies we regularly work with:

"One of my fellow managers told me recently about one of their staff, their mother was in a unit that had flood damage and the mother was elderly and that person had to go and help the person strip out the carpets and do all the work. But she wanted a day off, so she had a day off. And then what happened was she needed to have more and more time off. My colleague said, look you need to sort out your family situation and we will sort out what you need to do with your work time. So as a result of that, that person got all the work done and then couple of weeks later did the extra hours, tied it all up, and got back on track. And that person who had the elderly mother in the unit was very much appreciated, that the flexibility was involved. That was very important to her. I felt good about that because there were no rules or guidelines but the manager made the decision and he got everything—the thing got done and everyone got a win-win situation out of it. It didn’t go to HR, he just organized it"

I know which organisation I would rather be part of. The article in Management Today states that effective diversity management means understanding and supporting both the obvious and less obvious aspects of our individual differences. Diversity is much more than a policy; it is an everyday activity that, if done well, can lead to more engaged staff and a positive impact on the bottom line.

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The damaging windstorm in Melbourne two weeks ago gave me an interesting insight into how poorly prepared the leadership of our energy organisations were to deal with a crisis. You could argue that a simple demonstration of the energy of Mother Nature and its effects on modern civilisation is hardly a crisis but I doubt that many of the 300,000 Melbourne households that were without power for days would agree with you.

I was one of those left in the dark both literally and figuratively for close to 55 hours. I understood that it was an “unusual weather event” and it would not be easy to get everyone quickly back onto the power supply. I didn’t mind losing everything in my fridge and freezer, having no hot water, reading by candlelight or being without my laptop, broadband internet or Foxtel. But I did mind not being able to speak to anyone at my power company…and I was surprised by just how much I minded. When things are not going the way they should, we all look for reassurance and information to help us wait it out. The situation across Melbourne was complex and complicated and I knew that SP-Ausnet would not be able to tell me when they would get to the fallen powerlines in my street and I knew that every available repair crew member was on duty and out there working through the night to get the job done. My appreciation to them knows no bounds. But…not once was I able to find out whether anyone at the power company knew that our powerlines were down. Our suburb was either not listed on their answering machine message as offline or being worked on. In fact, on the Friday morning, we once again woke to a cold, dark morning and the recorded message “There are no known outages in your area” Yeah, right! My congratulations go to the one exception in all this – the CEO of Alinta, Peter McGarry, who was a shining example of “The buck stops here”. He was personally available to radio and television interviewers and the number of interviews he had done by day three was close to twenty. He took on board the concerns expressed by disgruntled customers who were unable to speak to anyone or get any information from their power company. And like his repair crews, he and his team worked long hours to stay on top of things. An SMS service for customers to report outages and damage was quickly set up as was a website to give up to date information. I was impressed to find out that on Friday as my household entered its third day without light, power or information, Alinta had rung their 1700 customers still waiting to be reconnected to let them know how things were progressing and ask how they were getting on. Peter McGarry made sure his company looked after their customers and kept the communication coming. When one of his linesmen was killed working to restore power to houses on the Mornington Peninsula, most of us would have understood if Peter had gone to ground and hidden out at Head Office. But that was not his style. While under enormous pressure he made time to visit the family and colleagues, made sure there were condolence notices from himself and the company in the Melbourne newspapers and I have no doubt he made time to attend the funeral as well. In contrast to my supplier, he didn’t hand any of that over to “a company spokesperson” from the PR department. Complications and complexity are part and parcel of crisis situations where the shifting nature of the problem is a big part of the challenge of solving it. Peter and the Alinta team stepped up to that challenge, made sure they kept telling everyone what they were doing as they did it and, as far as I'm concerned, did it markedly better than the rest.

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Ford Harding has just posted two versions of the same anecdote. The first paints the consultant as the hero while the second focuses 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.

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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.

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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 management
View 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.

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...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.

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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 dishevelled. 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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BHP Billiton axes its Knowledge Networks

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 31/01/08
Filed in Anecdotes, Communities of practice.

BHP Billiton axed their division called Operational Excellence last year. This was the group that, among other services, supported the organisations Knowledge Networks (also called communities of practice but language matters in this story). BHPB had developed the networks over the last 10 years but when the new CEO arrived he thought that if the business lines thought these networks were valuable then they should support them. Operational Excellence was a corporate service and while I don't know the exact numbers there might have been 30 or more people supporting their knowledge networks program.

Knowledge networks in BHPB were formal affairs. There was a defined process for creating one. Senior sponsorship was required. There were funded extremely well. And each one had one or more support people helping to run the network. In the case of their Global Maintenance Network there were at least a handful of support people. At the same time groups of people could informally come together without corporate support and these groups were communities of practice. Ironically it's a career limiting move at BHPB to mention knowledge networks because they connote corporate, bureaucratic and expensive. But calling gatherings of professionals 'communities of practice' is OK and perhaps even applauded. Language matters. History matters.

bhp billiton

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World Trade Center and emergency services mis-coordination

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 22/01/08
Filed in Anecdotes, Collaboration.

One tragic example [of mis-coordination] is recounted in Peter Denning’s article about HFN [hastily formed networks], in which he describes analysis of the disaster response efforts after the attack on the World Trade Center: New York Police Department (NYPD) helicopters that had been monitoring conditions by circling the towers had observed signs of structural collapse in the north tower and immediately issued an emergency evacuation order to all police; however, they failed to inform the firefighters, who, having had no warning, were not evacuated.

Huston, Tracey. "Enabling Adaptability & Innovation through Hastily Formed Networks." Reflections 7, no. 1 (2006): 9-29.

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The role of a story in lessons learning

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 22/01/08
Filed in Anecdotes, Knowledge.

Chris Collison is pondering the usefulness of the Kolb learning cycle as the basis for many of the lessons learning activities organisations conduct. I agree with Chris' observation that most organisations don't build in reflection and therefore are unable to reformulate what they have learned to change behaviour. And like Chris I'm not sure of the effectiveness of write-ups to achieve this last point. In fact I think we create our abstract conceptualisations (Kolb's language) by telling ourselves and others a story of what happen. Ironically the abstract comes from the specific of a story. Something like this happened to me just last week.

I got a friendly email from someone who has been a long-time subscriber to our newsletter. After mentioning that she had gained many useful tips and ideas from it she went on to say that she had only just realised we provided consulting services. I was nearly knocked off my chair—were we that poor at telling people what we do?. So I rang Mark and told him the story. He was gobsmacked. We obviously weren't letting people know in our newsletter we provided consulting services. What shall we do? Our first idea was to put a line at the top of our newsletter that said, in effect, 'we provide consulting services.' Actually we wordsmithed it a bit more than that. Then I called up our graphic designer, Kerenza, and told her the story and shared our plan for the oneliner. 'Ahhrg, that oneliner is awful,' she said. 'Before you were sending useful tips and information to me, now you are selling to me.' It was immediately clear that the one-liner approach was wrong and Kerenza and I came up with a new way forward.

So on reflection it was the story of the original email, told a number of times to different people that created new conversations that helped me learn about our brand, how we communicate to our newsletter subscribers and how we keep what we do authentic, fun and useful. And it changed my behaviour. To me, that's learning.

[thanks to Patrick Lambe for putting me on to Chris' post]

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Thoughts to actions

Posted by Chandni - 14/01/08
Filed in Anecdotes.

The best thing we could do for ourselves is reflect on the way we think. I read that in a book once (as a wisdom tip!)

Our thoughts affect the way we feel about something (emotions) and the way we react to situations (our behavior) and that chain reaction determines the outcome (results). At Anecdote, the sense-making activities we facilitate aim to invoke the right knowledge-sharing behaviors within an organization, and we start by asking people to reflect and share their emotional experiences. The anecdote circles help to subconsciously re-tune our thinking and thereby our actions and the results we achieve.

Here's an interesting anecdote that illustrates this chain reaction quite well.

We associate Alexander Graham Bell with the invention of the telephone, but it was actually Elisha Gray who invented it first. Gray was criticised by academia for an invention they found 'had no direct application,' and he let the criticism stump his creativity. Graham Bell, on the other hand, showed stronger self-belief. He walked into the Patent Office and secured a patent for his invention. Gray walked in two hours later, but it was obviously too late then.

You can read the full story here.

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The Beams of New College, Oxford

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 10/01/08
Filed in Anecdotes, Knowledge.

Another find from the filing cabinet clean up. This time an anecdote from Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn.

This story was recorded by Brand from the anthropologist Gregory Bateson.

New College, Oxford, is of rather late foundation, hence the name. It was founded around the late 14th century. It has, like other colleges, a great dining hall with big oak beams across the top. These might be two feet square and forty-five feet long.

A century ago, so I am told, some busy entomologist went up into the roof of the dining hall with a penknife and poked at the beams and found that they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College Council, who met in some dismay, because they had no idea where they would get beams of that calibre nowadays.

One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be some oak on College lands. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country. So they called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked about oaks. And he pulled his forelock and said, "Well sirs, we was wonderin' when you'd be askin'."

Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks has been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for five hundred years. "You don't cut them oaks. Them's for the College Hall."

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Maxine McKew tells three anecdotes

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 27/11/07
Filed in Anecdotes, Business storytelling.

People vote for politicians based on the emotions they generate not the intellectual merits of their policies.¹ And emotion is generated by the stories we are told and the stories we tell ourselves. We watch the candidates and observe what they do and tell ourselves a story about the type of person they are and what they stand for. The Rudd campaign understood this fact.

Kevin Rudd's campaign was effective in telling three types of stories which helped to create positive emotions towards him and the ALP. These three types of stories are: Who am I? Why am I here? and My vision story.²

Kevin Rudd's first television commercials contained his 'Who am I?' story. We learned how Kevin grew up in outback Queensland, how his parents didn't even get a high school education and how he enjoyed going back to his home town and talking with the residents about what they wanted for the future. For many people in the electorate Kevin was just like us.

Kevin's 'Why am I here?' stories revolved around his focus areas of an education revolution, being a economic conservative, getting rid of work choices, ratifying the Kyoto protocol, and providing new leadership. And in talking about these focus areas Rudd set out his vision for the future--his vision story.

Rudd's campaign mastered the master narratives required to create the right emotions in the electorate. Interesting, however, both Rudd and Howard avoided recounting anecdotes of specific events and encounters as a way to illustrate what the candidates really value. I have been told by one political insider that both Rudd and Howard are worried the media will crucify them for using anecdotes as a mere trick to spin a particular message.

But we saw on election night how storytelling can be done with authenticity and impact when Maxine McKew gave a short speech on the news that she look like winning the seat of Bennelong. Maxine started by saying some general statements about the contest for Bennelong being on a knife edge, and how the seat will never be taken for granted again. Then she moved into storytelling mode, first remembering how she was at this town hall only a few months before and then recalling the many interviews she had done over the years and that some of the very special people she has ever met were actually in Bennelong, and this is where the mood changed as Maxine told three anecdotes.

I'm thinking of the 90-year old Sister Louise who's at St Catherines who I met just a couple of weeks ago. She's blind. But the day I talked to her she said, "Nobody is blind in heaven."

And I'm thinking of 6 year old Emily at Denniston East. She told me that she told her parents to vote for Kevin Rudd because Kevin Rudd would be a great Prime Minister for children. And you know, ... we need a great Prime Minister for children.

And I'm thinking as well of a boy called Ali who only recently completed his HSC exams, who—maybe Ali you are here tonight—who a few years ago was in a Pakistani refugee camp waiting for passage out, and Ali has found a safe home, and a welcome here in Australia ...

I'm sure many people felt goosebumps at the end of this speech--emotions were created.

We help leaders tell these types of stories, first by helping leaders learn how to find their stories (of course Maxine is an expert at this but we all can do it), then help them learn how to tell these stories and ensure at all times there is authenticity in what you say.

1. Westen, Drew. The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. New York: PublicAffairs, 2007.

2. Simmons, Annette. The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion through the Art of Storytelling. Revised edition ed. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

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Let's be proactive with organisational storytelling

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 21/11/07
Filed in Anecdotes.

Stories are created in organisations whenever something remarkable happens, and people love to remark on how leaders react under pressure because the way anyone reacts under pressure reveals their character. With this thought in mind I have been reading an excellent book called Crucial Conversations and I was struck by the following anecdote about a leader who was put under pressure and how she reacted.

Greta, the CEO of a mid-sized corporation, is two hours into a rather tense meeting with her top leaders. For the past six months she has been on a personal campaign to reduce costs. Little has been accomplished to date, so Greta calls the meeting. Surely people will tell her why they haven't started cutting costs. After all, she has taken great pains to foster candour.

Greta has just opened the meeting to questions when a manager haltingly rises to his feet, fidgets, stares at the floor, and then nervously asks if he can ask a very tough question. The way the fellow emphasises the word very makes it sound as if he's about the accuse Greta of kidnapping the Lindbergh baby.

The frightened manager continues.

"Greta, you've been at us for six months to find ways to cut costs. I'd be lying if I said that we've given you much more than a lukewarm response. If you don't mind, I'd like to tell you about one thing that's making it tough for us to push for costs cuts."

"Great, fire away," Greta says as she smiles in response.

"Well, while you've been asking us to use both sides of our paper and forego improvements, you're having a second office built."

Greta freezes and turns bright red. Everyone looks to see what happens next. The manager plunges on ahead.

"The rumor is that the furniture alone costs $150,000. Is that right?"

Of course what happens next determines the type of story that gets told in the organisation.

Greta might have said, "Excuse me, but I don't think that my new office is an appropriate topic for this forum." In which case a story of the leader's hypocrisy will fly around the organisation in a flash.

Here is what Greta actually said: "You know what? We need to talk about this. I'm glad you ask the question. It'll give us a chance to discuss what's really going on." And this conversation led to Greta investigating the costs of the new office and committing to drawing up new plans designed to save 50% of the costs or cancel the project altogether. Now her team knew she was serious about cost cutting and by encouraging dialogue created an opportunity for a positive story to travel.

In organisational storytelling there can be too much emphasis on finding and retelling persuasive stories. We should also help leaders take actions that create the stories that help the organisation. We can be proactive and improve an organisation's storyability.

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Letting go

Posted by Daryl - 15/11/07
Filed in Anecdotes, Fun.

I was waiting for a flight the other day and I happened to catch 5 minutes of a surfing documentary featuring Kelly Slater, 8 times world champion. So what has this got to do with a blog on business narrative I hear you ask?

Well, when talking about his 7th title win, he tells an amazing story. I'll try and retell it (although I'm sure that I won't do it justice) ...

Expectedly, he had surfed his way right into yet another championship final contest. However, he was beaten comprehensively in the first heat of the final, even though he thought he had surfed particularly well. Angry with himself, and distraught at the thought of losing the title, he had to come up with a strategy to make an assault on the title in the next two rounds.

Realising his predicament, he took some time to ponder the situation. There was clearly a lot riding on the next heat. He wondered whether he should perhaps 'try harder'. But he soon realised that this would not work, he had to do something more. He had to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat.

What did he decide to do? He made a conscious decision to 'let go'-to stop trying so hard and to go out there and just have some fun!

And the result? You guessed it, he came out and scored two perfect 10's in the next two rounds, with some awesome rides, one where he visibly nearly comes off the board twice! Just incredible.

What amazing courage in the midst of all this chaos to trust his instincts and follow his heart and not his head. I think there is some important wisdom in this story that is applicable to other areas of life.

When was the last time you or your organisation just 'let go' and had some fun? What were the results?

There is a trailer for the documentary here if you're interested.

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Name badges as conversation starters

Posted by Robyn - 7/11/07
Filed in Anecdotes, Book reviews, Communities of practice.

Graham Harvey in his book 'Seducing the Vigilante Customer ' tells of his experience in a restaurant.

"Even though I sort of half guessed what the answer might be, I went ahead and asked the question anyway.

"Why do you have Cardiff, Wales written under your name?"

"Cardiff is where I was born." replied the waiter.

The conversation then continued for a couple of minutes centring on how long she had been in Australia, why she had left Wales etc. She also explained that everybody in the hotel had their birthplace inscribed on their respective name badges and how positive the idea had been in creating conversation between guests and staff."

Although Graham is looking at this from a sales and marketing perspective his point is relevant to any group that is trying to build relationships. A key step in establishing rapport is engaging in conversations on a first name basis as quickly as possible.

You could have a lot of fun with this. Here are a few possibilities from the conventional to the quirky:
* your nickname
* sports you love to play or watch
* the footy team you follow
* your favourite biography
* what's on the cover of your diary
* a thought provoking quote
* your personal motto
* the beginning of an interesting story

Can you suggest any better ones?

Add something interesting or unexpected to a name badge at your next seminar, conference or community of practice kick-off meeting and watch curiosity get those conversations started.

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Collaboration conditions

Posted by Mark Schenk - 27/10/07
Filed in Anecdotes, Collaboration.

I was having a conversation last week about how easy it is to rob people of the permission to collaborate. Examples were provided of how 'bosses' don't even need to say anything: a disapproving look is enough to communicate that a chat while making coffee isn't considered 'working'.

The conversation reminded me of an experience during one of our projects. The client representative couldn't find a meeting room and took us to this fabulous collaboration space in their new(ish) building. This new building was designed to enhance collaboration. An atrium runs along one entire wall and is filled with secluded nooks for private conversations, with areas where groups can get together and with cafe areas where people can have 'chance meetings'. I was surprised that our little group was the only one in there and asked why. Our host explained....

Early on, this place was used all the time. I loved it and brought my team here for regular meetings and, with the shortage of formal meeting rooms, I had lots of my smaller meetings here as well. The place always had a great 'buzz' about it. But the design had a big flaw, the executive offices were all positioned overlooking the atrium. One day I was called into the office of an executive who told me they considered I was spending too much of my time in the atrium (collaboration space). Apparently others had similar experiences. Nowadays hardly anyone comes here. We feel we are being watched.

In complex environments we know that little things can make a big difference and in this case the impact is obvious in the low usage of this great space. The conversation also remind me of the powerful impact of managers in their day-to-day interactions. Every interaction is an opportunity to build or to erode engagement....and collaboration. It could have been a very different outcome if the executives had said 'its great to see you using this area'.

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Client relationships - getting a helping hand

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 30/09/07
Filed in Anecdotes, Collaboration.

We are lucky to have many terrific clients that we love working with. Here's an example.

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Dreadful managers

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 16/09/07
Filed in Anecdotes.

How do they get away with such appalling behaviour? I've seen some dreadful displays by managers who seem to revel in the power and forgetting their role is to serve their staff so everyone can deliver value to their clients/stakeholders. Bob Sutton calls these people assholes and has written a neat book about them (The No Asshole Rule) and how to survive their despicable behaviour (here's a list of survival tips).

So if 'Who Killed Channel 9' by Gerald Stone is true, there is a new pantheon of arseholes to be considered in Australia. In a stinging confrontation with channel nine executives, Kerry Packer hurled one accusation and expletive after another. Rory Callaghan, head of light entertainment, had the following interchange with Packer:

'So where are the figures I asked you to get for the last ten years of Sale of the Century?'

Callaghan was left absolutely stunned. 'You never asked me for those figures,' he replied.

'I f...ing well did,' he snarled.

'No you didn't,' Callaghan bravely persisted.

'Right,' Packer retorted, 'let's fix this once and for all.' With that he picked up the phone to his personal assistant back at Park Street, Di Stone, and barked into the mouthpiece. 'Di, who's the f...ing idiot I spoke to about getting all those statistics for Sale of the Century - you know, so we can discuss the seven o'clock slot?' He listened for a moment, then Callaghan could almost sniff the brimstone on the dragon's breath, 'Rory Callaghan! That's exactly what I f...ing thought!'

In the next couple of pages of the book we discover the call with Di Stone was a charade and there was no one at the other end of the telephone.

Technorati Tags: assholes, bob sutton, kerry packer

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Building relationships

Posted by Mark Schenk - 15/08/07
Filed in Anecdotes, Collaboration.

I flew from Newcastle to Melbourne last night and had a fantastic two-hour chat with the lady in the next seat. By the end of the journey I felt like I had a new friend. She posed three questions to me that helped us build a relationship in a very short time. Give these questions a try and I suspect you will surprised at what happens. I was.

What is the best piece of advice you can give me?
What has been your most profound experience?
What is the greatest gift you have ever received?

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How a transcript can enhance listening

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 10/08/07
Filed in Anecdotes.

I've just returned from a couple of days in New Zealand working with my old colleagues from IBM. It was a fun to spend two days thinking and talking about knowledge strategy.

I had lunch with Ross Pearce from IBM and he told me how he helped two parts of a company resolve their communications difficulties using an anecdote circle. He got both parties in the room and encouraged them to tell their stories about what was happening. The session went for three hours! One participant came up to Ross at the end of the session and thanked him because it was one of the very few times they have had a conversation without the pressure of delivering a specific output. A good start but the interesting insight came later.

Ross recorded and transcribed the meeting and sent the 100 page transcript to all the attendees asking them to read it. At first they resisted—“it's so long, we don't have time”. they lamented—but after some gentle persuasion they all agreed. In fact it was quite easy to read because it was in their language, it was their words.

A week later they all met again and many of the participants said the same thing about reading the transcript: “I can't believe how much I missed at our first meeting. I guess I was too busy thinking about the next thing I was going to say and failed to listen properly.”

This second meeting was the watershed for the relationship between the two groups. And while Ross never provided me with the details I got the sense that there now existed a foundation to rebuild the rapport between the two groups.

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History matters

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 4/08/07
Filed in Anecdotes.

I just received this comment from AJ which I thought you would enjoy. I will let her comment speak for itself.

I'm an anthropologist who's just finished a study of a small government department. After reading your story above, I thought I'd share the value of understanding corporate histories, corporate kinship & traditions I learned during my doctoral fieldwork.

This particular agency had a culture of purposely obfuscating exact budget expenditure amongst the executives and reporting incorrectly to Treasury. Don't interpret this the wrong way - no one was taking any public money, rather, they were shuffling it about so that money given for one purpose but not spent was being used elsewhere within the agency. Lower ranked managers and field staff widely condemned this practice, and simply couldn't understand why it happened.

When I examined the agency's history, it turned out for the first three years of its existence (1955-1958) it had been legislatively created *without* a budget. Thus, the original directors had to fight, lie and cajole to get money just to employ staff and maintain public infrastructure etc. Also, this agency had its own powers to employ staff directly rather than via usual public sector channels. This upset the mandarins in the public sector and they gave the agency a really hard time for more than 20 years by consistently withholding funds ... this was around the same time the executives who I dealt with were first being employed as junior officers. It was stated quite openly to me by people now retired that they didn't tell Treasury anything truthful because the buggers would cut their budget if they did ...!

Of course, this habit of 'shuffling' money and not telling Treasury everything became a tradition passed from one group of senior managers to the next - even when the organisation became large and powerful during the 1980s & 1990s.

The senior execs all drank with each other, went bush with each other, played golf etc etc. and inducted newly promoted members into their ranks in this way... thus the tradition was passed on until last year when a director from outside was hired, came in, took one look at the annual report and the figures on the computer and went HUH?!?!

So just a short tale about the role of history, tradition & kinship in g'ment ... from an ethnographer living in her tent (like Malinoswki) studying natives in the field.

By the way, Anectdote is a great resource. Thank you so much for your work and sharing.

Some people say to me, “why are we worrying about the past? What's done is done. We need to keep focussed on the future.” These categories of past, present and future can lead us astray. Time is a continuum not a category.

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Good conversations lead to good stories

Posted by Robyn - 2/08/07
Filed in Anecdotes, Business storytelling.

Watching Andrew Denton interview Michael Parkinson on More Than Enough Rope on ABC television recently was a lesson in good interviewing techniques. Denton even admitted he only needed to turn up, say something to get started and then sit back and let Michael just tell his stories.

Parkinson was relating how difficult it was way back when he was trying get his interview show up and running and he credited the late Orson Welles with its successful beginning. Because Parkinson was not as yet an established name it was difficult to get people to come on the show. The producer went all out to get a big name, one that would smooth the way for others and flew to Spain where Welles was making the eventually uncompleted Don Quixote. The successful deal negotiated meant persuading British Airways to knock out the front two rows of seats on the aircraft out so that Welles could sleep on a mattress on the floor.

“And he walked on the aeroplane and he looked at the mattress on the floor and smiled and went and sat in the seat. It jumped the hurdle. And then he came to my room and I’d been working on this interview for, like, all my life, and I opened the door and he was dressed entirely in black, black sombrero, black tie, black shirt, black cloak and he swept into the room. Incredibly dramatic.

“My name’s Orson Welles”, he said “And you would be?”

And I said, “Er Parkinson.”

“Yes”, he said.

And he looked around and he saw this scrap of paper on my desk and he said, “That?”

I said, “My questions.”

“Do you mind if I look?”

I said, “No.”

And he picked them up and he turned to me and he said, “How many of these shows have you done?”

I said, “Two.”

“I’ve done many more”, he said. “Will you take my advice?”

I said, “Certainly”.

And he ripped up the questions and he said, “Let’s talk”. And walked away.

And he sat down and he did two one hours that night, that were majestic.”

Tearing up the questions might run counter to our instincts of wanting to be well prepared for what comes next. Sometimes the best stories arise from our letting go of the process and just having a conversation.

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Ideas made to stick - a scene from West Wing

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 30/07/07
Filed in Anecdotes, Knowledge.

Made to Stick is one of my favourite books at the moment because it's well written and well researched. And, you know what? the ideas stick. So I thought I would pass on this sticky story from Victoria Ward's blog. It's a scene from West Wing.

In one of the episodes of the final series of the West Wing, CJ Cragg is more and more frustrated by her inability to make a dent, leave something behind. So when someone from an NGO tries to make an appointment with her, she breaks with habit and gives him a slot in her diary.

He overwhelms her with statistics about the atrocities in Sudan. Thousands, millions, terrible things, rape, amputation, devastation. It’s all beyond her grasp, there is nothing she can imagining doing in this vastness of human failure, and he can see from her face that he is losing her attention, so he says, suddenly

‘When the babies die, the mothers carry them round in their arms because there is nowhere to put them down.’

20 words (I approximate, from memory.)

‘When the babies die, the mothers carry them round in their arms because there is nowhere to put them down.’

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The fragility of trust

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 25/07/07
Filed in Anecdotes.

A friend of mine is a lawyer, and a good one at that. Our families just spent a week together in Mossy Point on the New South Wales coast and, as you might expect, we told each other lots of stories helping everyone to catch up on one anothers’ lives.

Today my friend, I will call her Julie (not her real name) told an anecdote illustrating the fragility of trust. Julie's an expert in collaborative law and she was organising a group of 10 law firms to pay for an ad in the yellow pages. One of the firms contributing to the ad was run by someone Julie knew quite well but he was concerned Julie's law firm would have pride of place on the ad. To address this concern Julie suggested that she would draw the firm’s names out of a hat and whatever order they came out would be how they would be listed on the ad. That seemed pretty fair, she thought. The law firm owner was happy with that idea but he said to Julie, “but we need someone independent to draw the names out.” My friend was incensed and she said to me, “It was at this point I stopped really trusting the guy”.

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John F. Kennedy and the French Revolution

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 16/06/07
Filed in Anecdotes.

I heard this anecdote last week.

John Kennedy was meeting the Premier of China and during some initial small talk Kennedy asked the Premier what he thought of the French Revolution. The Premier replied, “it's probably too early to say.”

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The war for talent

Posted by Mark Schenk - 16/06/07
Filed in Anecdotes.

The anecdote below, told by a participant in a recent workshop, really made me stop and think. There are lots of lessons it, not least of which is that seemingly innocuous actions can have a big influence on a person's decision to join an organisation.

A friend of mine had applied for a fantastic new job. Everything went well during the interview and selection process and the organisation sent her a letter of offer. She turned down the opportunity because the letter of offer was sent to her at 11pm on a Friday evening by the person who was to be her new manager.

It also reminds me of dedicated (workaholic) people I have known or worked for who put in long hours but have no expectation that their staff do the same, and tell them that. The only catch is that their behaviour has a lot more impact than their words...

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Finding and amplifying a sense of direction—directional stories

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 1/06/07
Filed in Anecdotes.

This week I have been talking to people about foundational stories and how they are important for reinforcing the core vales and direction for everyone in the organisation. HP has a well know foundation story about Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard starting their little electronics company in a garage with a measly $500. Within this story are the basic principles HP was built on.

The foundation story is not the only directional story that people should hear but without good directional stories an organisation can be overwhelmed by whatever stories that well up with each passing day. Here's one example of when things get out of hand. I was at an investment bank and asked the HR Director what stories were prominent in his company. He shook his head in dismay and said, “We have a relatively new CEO and have just finished our vision, mission and values project. Everyone is telling the story that the CEO went home on Friday, pulled out the vision, mission, values from his previous company, came into the office on Sunday, photocopied the statements onto A3 paper and plastered them around level 27. For the life of me I can't dislodge this story.”

Directional stories already exist. You just need to work together with everyone in the organisation to find them and instil their telling throughout the organisation. We use the three journeys process to help clients find and amplify their own directional stories.

Then serendipity strikes. Just as I was thinking about this topic I read this story in a chapter by Karl Weick about how VISA was started. What do you think this foundational story conveys about the values of VISA?

Here's what happened at VISA. In the early 1970s, National BankAmericard Incorporated (NBI) turned around the Bank of America's faltering credit card business in the United States (Hock, 1999, p. 155). Soon thereafter, NBI was pressured by BankAmericard licensees in the rest of the world to do the same thing for them. The problems were formidable. Not only did each licensee also have different marketing, computer, and operational systems, but each licensee also dealt with different language, currency, culture, and legal systems, all of which had to be transcended somehow. A technological fix was out of the question because banks were still using computer punch cards and tape, and there was no Internet. After months of tense negotiations, a meeting of the organizing committee was scheduled late in the second year of organizing. The meeting was to one last attempt to resolve three deal-breaking disagreements. Positions had hardened and the organizers could think of no compromise that had any chance of being accepted.

Shortly before the final meeting, the chairman of the organizing committee, Dee Hock, reflected on how the international group had been able to get as far as they did. It dawned on him that “at critical moments, all participants had felt compelled to succeed. And at those same moments , all had been willing to compromise. They had not thought of winning or losing but of a larger sense of purpose and concept of community that could transcend and enfold them” (1999, p. 245). Hock and his staff hatched a plan for the final meeting. They contacted a local jeweller and asked him to create a die from which he would cast sets of golden cuff links. One cuff link would contain a picture of half of the globe and the phrase, “the will to succeed.” The other link would contain the other half of the globe and the phrase, “the grace to compromise.”

When the final meeting actually convened, as expected it was polarized, contentious. The Canadian banks refused to participate and withdrew, and Hock adjourned the meeting midday and said they would reconvene the next morning on order to plan how to disband. Before adjourning, Hock invited everyone to a grand dinner that evening in Sausalito in recognition of their undeniable efforts to try to make the organization work.

After dinner, there was brief reminiscing about shared experiences and obstacles overcome. The the waiters passed among the diners and placed a small wrapped gift in front of each of them. Hock asked people to open the elegant boxes and examine the contents.

He then said quietly, “We wanted to give you something that you could keep for the remainder of your life as a reminder of this day. On one link is half of the world surrounded with the phrase ”the will to succeed“ and the second link is the other half of the world and the phrase 'the grace to compromise.' We meet tomorrow for the final time to disband the effort after two arduous years. I have one last request. Will you please wear the cuff links to the meeting in the morning? When we part we will take with us a reminder for the rest of our lives that the world can never be united through us because we lack the will to succeed and the grace to compromise. But if by some miracle our differences dissolve before morning, this gift will remind us that the world was united because we did have the will to succeed and the grace to compromise (paraphrased from Hock, 1999, pp. 247-48)

Then Hock sat down. There was a full minute of absolute silence as people examined their gift. And then the silence was shattered by one of Hock's exuberant Canadian friends who exploded, ”You miserable bastard!“ The room erupted in laughter. The next morning everyone was wearing the cuff links. By noon, agreement was reached on every issue and VISA International came into existence.

Weick, K, 2004. Rethinking Organizational Design in Richard J. Boland Jr, and Fred Collopy (eds) Managing as Designing, Stanford Business Books, Stanford.

Hock, D. 1999. Birth of the chaordic age. Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco

Technorati Tags: karl weick, VISA

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How Gehry designs—the full story

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 22/05/07
Filed in Anecdotes, Book reviews.

On the recommendation of Johnnie Moore, I read A Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman. I was really looking forward to this book because it held the promise of providing an interesting view of issues dear to my heart: chaos, complexity and messiness (I also hoped it might give me good reasons for maintaining my messy desk). Sadly I was disappointed with the book because the authors spent too much time trying to categorise mess and messy people (The archaeologist, the order prig, the mess distractor), relying on a single source for major arguments (see Corporation's Big Plan and their use of Starbuck's 1992 journal article), and relying heavily on newspaper sources (more that a 1/3 of the 50 sources).

Despite all these flaws I found one story about the renowned architect Frank Gehry and his firm which got me excited, but again I was let down.

Gehry Partners were engaged to design and build the new business school at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. Gehry is renowned for using models to convey how the building will look and feel. As told in A Perfect Mess, Gehry is mindful of how difficult it is to translate the emotion impact of the building when you collapse the model into a two-dimensional blueprint. Abrahamson and Freedman write:

“The school approved the design and brought in a small army of contractors to build it. The contractors duly admired, in a shocked and fretful way, the model of the God-awfully complex structure they were about to undertake, and then asked for the blueprints, to which Gehry's team replied that there weren't any. The contractors thought the group was joking, but Gehry and his associates assured the contractors they were serious. ... Gehry's group maintained that the contractors could derive the measurements they needed by studying the model of the building ...” pp. 87-88

The story continues and the contractors work together with Gehry Partners to co-create the building. The building in delivered on time, on budget and everyone is thrilled with the result. Furthermore, the contractors develop a multitude of new skills and techniques such as new ways to bend steel beams, survey sites, affix unconventional materials. Wow! I was impressed. This was very similar to our three journey approach. The first journey was Gehry and Partners creating the scale models, the second journey was involving the contractors in co-designing the building, and the third journey was its construction.

But something bugged me about the story, so I started surfing the web to see if I could find the source referred to in the book's end notes. I learnt that as the building was designed and constructed the academics from the Case Western Reserve Business School, lead by Professor Richard Boland, were studying the process. There were a number of papers written as a result and I read this one called Design Matters for Management. The first thing I was struck by was how Gehry Partners makes extensive use of computer models in their work. Hmmm, don't you need measurements to make computer models?

So I emailed Richard Boland and he seemed as surprised as I was. It turns out that Gehry does use models in lieu of blueprints a long time before a blueprint is created. The firm works with speciality contractors who are crucial to the success of the project early in the design phase and works with them to create the design. Gehry avoids the traditional approach of drawing something up and saying “here is the blueprint, go build it.”

I think Abrahamson and Freedman failed the plausibility test because that's what we listen for when we hear a story; is it plausible? You can see from the picture I included just how complex (and I think this is complex and not merely complicated) his building are. To think they were built without blueprints seem implausible.

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A sensemaking story

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 16/05/07
Filed in Anecdotes.

Here's an interesting story Bob Sutton recently received from a US Marine in relation to his excellent book, The No Asshole Rule. It's a terrific sensemaking story because I can imagine people will have strong opinions about what the Marine did and so the story will easily start a conversation that will help the participants better understand how they might act if they ever encountered such an asshole.

I'm reminded of a story of my own which I'd like to share with you. I was part of a special project for the Marine Corps. I was in a leadership role actively playing a part in the physical military operations and the academic/management part ruled by civilian contractors. Because of my education, I was tasked to play a liaison role which often meant bearing ill will from both parties as I tried to explain their intentions to the others. Right off the bat, a member of the civilian management team rubbed me the wrong way. I wasn't sure what it was until he severely berated one of my senior Marines, telling him at one point that “we had all taken a oath to defend this Nation.” I was offended by that. I knew for a fact he took no such oath. But more importantly, I believed that he was acting in a manner in which he thought was consistent with military leadership-- an assumption he developed from watching too many movies.

I held my tongue at the moment but that evening during our After Action Review, I brought the issue up. We were seated across from each other at a conference table. As soon as I aired my complaints, he puffed up in his chair, put both hands on the table and started looking at me menacingly. He was a large man-- about six and a half feet and easily 250 pounds. At that moment, I realized that he was trying to physically intimidate me. I'm much smaller-- about 5'10“ and 190 pounds. I could tell that this was a natural reaction to him and he did this often. For a moment I was amused. When he continued to glare at me, I finally drew my sidearm, placed it on the table and said to him, ”Calm down. I deal in real violence.“ He settled down and walked out of the office a couple of minutes later. I hoped that this encounter would shift his behavior but it didn't. He was a senior member of the team and he started treating everybody else worse. Me-- he mostly left alone. I think I made my life better but I sure didn't do anything to make my teammates lives easier. Eventually, the most senior member of the civilian team removed him but not before I threatened to ”accidentally“ hurt him in training. I'm not proud I had to resort to that.

This was my first contact with the civilian management world and I was not impressed. Unfortunately, my experiences after haven't been much better. We certainly have our share of lousy leaders in the military world but I was surprised to see how much backstabbing and political in-fighting existed in civilian leadership circle.

Technorati Tags: bob sutton, us marine

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The story of a map - Massimo Vignelli's 1972 NYC Subway Map

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 14/05/07
Filed in Anecdotes.

Imagine if you could get people to talk on camera about their achievements and mistakes. The result could be a powerful, especially if you use these stories to get people talking. Here's a tiny example on a topic dear to my heart: how to convey complex information simply. In this clip Massimo Vignelli talks about his 1972 information design masterpiece, the New York City Subway map. There are a couple of things I noticed in this four minute video, which is an out-take for the documentary Helvetica.

• the actual map was a powerful reminder device
• enough time had elapsed for Massimo to be comfortable to talk about his mistakes (just one) - mind you, you could imagine his self confidence soaring
• the beauty of the map comes from knowing what to leave out--and if Massimo could do it again he would have left out even more

Mr Vignelli was inspired by Henry Beck's 1933 legendary map of the London Underground. You can take a look at London's current versions here. Michael Bierut has written an essay called Mr Vignelli's Map which you might enjoy.

Thanks to 37 Signals for the pointer

Technorati Tags: information design, massimo vignellie

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The story of the old man and the insulting children

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 27/04/07
Filed in Anecdotes, Changing behaviour, Fun.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I’m reading Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn. It’s a terrific book. This story struck my funny bone so I thought I’d share it with you.

Each day an elderly man endured the insults of a crowd of ten-year-olds as they passed his house on their way home from school. One afternoon, after listening to another round of jeers about how stupid and ugly and bald he was, the man came up with a plan. He met the children on his lawn the following Monday and announced that anyone who came back the next day and yelled rude comments about him would receive a dollar. Amazed and excited, they showed up even earlier on Tuesday, hollering epithets for all they were worth. True to his word, the old man ambled out and paid everyone. “Do the same tomorrow,” he told them, “and you’ll get twenty-five cents for your trouble.” The kids thought that was still pretty good and turned out again on Wednesday to taunt him. At the first catcall, he walked over with a roll of quarters and again paid off his hecklers. “From now on,” he announced, “I can give you only a penny for doing this.” The kids looked at each other in disbelief. “A penny?” they repeated scornfully. “Forget it!” And they never came back again.

Tags: rewards

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Lessons learning: using stories to share understanding

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 8/04/07
Filed in Anecdotes, Business storytelling.

This morning (Happy Easter!) I started writing a paper on a narrative approach to lessons learning. I’m at the point of gathering my thoughts and had the idea of sharing some of them as they occur to me. I hope it’s not too ill-informed but if that’s the case I’m hoping you’ll help me correct my wayward thinking.

The paper I’m writing argues against merely capturing stories as a way to share lessons. I thought I would start the paper by reflecting on the nature of narrative in order to build a case against the database-only approach (notice how I qualify these statements about capturing and databases because I do believe they play a role).

Stories are told in context

Stories are told in context to illustrate a point. No one wants to tell a story to have the listeners cock they heads and say , “huh?” The story makes sense in relation to what came before and what is likely to follow. It also makes sense in terms of who is in the conversation and the collective identity of the group. A story in isolation is likely to require active interpretation—what did she mean here? A story in context is hardly noticed and usually makes sense immediately. Perhaps the real danger of an isolated story is that its original intention can be misunderstood. Perhaps even reversed. For example, people often quote Robert Frost’s Mending Wall advocating for barriers, saying “Good fences make good neighbors”, yet when you read the entire poem (in context) you realise Frost is questioning the need for fences.

Here is an anecdote I told last week—without context.

When we started ActKM each person on the organising committee had a title: president, secretary, treasurer, etc. After a while we heard that members felt obliged to seek our permission to kick off any new initiative and there was also some suspicion about what this group was doing. The members felt it was a closed shop. Once we realised what was happening we discarded the formal titles and called everyone in the organising group a coordinator and the group became known as the coordinator’s group.

Take a moment to reflect on what this story means for you and see how close that meaning matches my intent when I told it.

So here’s the context. Last week I was at a meeting with John Smith, Etienne Wenger and the members of a new group of people invited to work with John and Etienne to re-energise CP2. We were talking about what this new group should be called. Before the meeting the group was called the oversight committee but intuitively John and Etienne felt that the name didn’t reflect the intent of the group. At the end of the meeting we agreed to call the group the coordination group.

Did you have a different meaning for the original story?

Now you might be thinking “gee, Shawn is really getting hung up with the meaning of the story. Surely stories are powerful because they have multiple meanings?” I agree, the multiple meanings are an important feature of narratives. Please bear with me while I take you though the next point.

There are many versions of the story I told John and the gang last week. For example if we were talking about how not to setup a community of practice I might have told a version that emphasised how we ended up with the formal titles in the first place and how our dalliances with KMCI were misguided. A different meaning.

There is more to the story than in its telling. The story listeners recreate the story as it unfolds and imbue it with their own meaning which is dependent on the way it’s told, the context of its telling and the history of the listener. The story becomes a catalyst for a group of people to make sense of a situation and choose their next steps (action).

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting David Boje. In our meeting, which was attended by 15 or so people, I made the statement that “the magic is not in the story, it’s in the interaction among people who are prompted to relate by hearing the story.” David was uncomfortable with this statement because he felt there is magic in stories. In reflection I think my wording was inaccurate. What I should have said was that “the answer is not in the story but is contained in the sensemaking that’s prompted by stories.” Storytelling is a social phenomena and we need to seek opportunities to tell one another stories, perhaps prompted by stories the have already been collected.

So hopefully I will have more for you on this topic over the coming weeks. Love to hear your thoughts.

Tags: David+Boje, Etienne+Wenger, John+Smith

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Anecdote circles don't work for everyone

Posted by Mark Schenk - 6/04/07
Filed in Anecdotes.

Occasionally, anecdote circles don’t work. Sometimes, people don’t get a lot out of them.

In the feedback session for the leadership program mentioned on Wednesday one of the participants had this to say:

I attended one of the anecdote circles and, no offense meant Mark, but I thought it was a bit of a waste of time. But now, when I see all these stories assembled and how we can use them and how powerful they are…well I have changed my mind – I get it now.

Yesterday I ran anecdote circles in Brisbane involving people providing services and support for the homeless. Despite them being desperately over worked and it being the last day before the Easter break, the feedback from both circles was really positive. So, while anecdote circles might not work for everyone, they seem to really work for most.

I also was to acknowledge the incredible contribution these people make. In a resource-poor sector they make a difference every day in a very confronting, emotionally demanding and sometimes dangerous job that they get paid peanuts to do.

 

Tags: leadership, homelessness

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Anecdote: making positive choices

Posted by Mark Schenk - 4/04/07
Filed in Anecdotes, Business storytelling.

I am in a plane to Brisbane reflecting on the second delivery of a 2.5 day leadership program we have helped develop for the Australian arm of an international company. A large part of the program used anecdotes collected from within the organisation on leadership behaviours and their impact. The feedback from the participants was great and so were they.

One of the participants reflected on an occasion when she was frustrated that the majority of her team were consistently late for meetings. Faced with many possible ways to handle the problem, what she chose to do was to send an email to the one person who was consistently on time and thanked them for always being punctual and told them how much she valued this.

Tags: appreciative+inquiry, positive+stories

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Shell's blue book - a fine example of storytelling

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 22/03/07
Filed in Anecdotes, Communities of practice.

In 2001 Shell collected a bunch of stories and put them together in a booklet now know as the Blue Book, but with the official title of Stories from the Edge: Managing Knowledge through New Ways of Working within Shell's Exploration and Production Business. It’s a landmark publication because it shows that a company in a hard-nosed industry like oil exploration and production recognises the value of storytelling and are getting benefits from its application.

The booklet (87 pages) is in four parts:

• Global Networks
• Global Consultancy
• Centres of Excellence
• Distributed Teams

Many of the stories tell how the organisation has saved money  by sharing knowledge. Others are about how new tools and techniques have been used. In each case the stories are in the language of the Shell employees. Here’s an example:

Pecten Cameroon's research revealed that other operators had achieved production gains by injecting demulsifier downhole in gas lifted wells, reducing viscosity in the production string and thereby increasing production. After a trial evaluation of their own, the company obtained a gain of 500 barrels per day or $5 million per annum. The approach is being extended to 17 other wells with prospective gains of $9 million per year.

What I find most interesting about the Blue Book is how the authors recognised that collecting and sharing stories of success is a powerful way to garner resources for things like communities of practice, which are notoriously difficult to develop a business case for. In fact, any learning initiative is difficult to justify in a strictly analytical way (to see why have a look at this post I wrote a while back-Learning initiatives need stories not measurement).

BHP Billiton has taken a similar approach with their communities of practice (also called Networks). Check out their Ok Tedi story.

Throughout the Blue Book are quotes from Dave Snowden’s early papers on narrative techniques for knowledge management. I hadn’t heard about any work Dave had done with Shell so it was a welcomed surprise.

Tags: shell, dave+snowden, blue+book

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Sensemaking

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 20/03/07
Filed in Anecdotes.

This description of sensemaking makes the most sense to me.

Sensemaking involves turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action. (Weick et. al 2005)

I’ll tell you why.

When I run lessons learning sessions I’ll often start the session by asking, “So, what did you learn from this project?” The typical response is, “Hmmmm, let me think … Nup, didn’t learn anything really.” Then we timeline the project, identify key events, retell stories of what happened and then this happens: “Remember how we got the funding? It was a shocker. We had to get the Commissioner to move money to the large projects vote and as a result we never really had a project sponsor. I would never do it that way again.” It’s this point of putting the idea into words, usually as a story, that the lessons are identified (not sure they’ve been learned yet).

The same think happened to me last week. We (I’m working with Patti Anklam and Bruce Hoppe on this one) are running a social network analysis for a global community of practice of chocolate experts. When we presented the first SNA charts the immediate response from the client was, “Nothing new here really.” After a number of discussions the response was, “Wow! Heaps of insights.”

Weick, K. E., K. M. Sutcliffe, et al. (2005). “Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking.” Organization Science 16(4): 409-421.

Tags: patti+anklam, bruce+hoppe, chocolate

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Identifying a story

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 18/03/07
Filed in Anecdotes.

I’m just in the process of building up some reflections for my workshop in Boston (you’re most welcome to register and attend) in a couple of weeks and thought I would share some snippets as I progress. You will notice some of the following text is directly from previous blog posts and some is new.

Annette Simmons says that explaining storytelling is like explaining kittens.

“We all know about kittens. We have wonderful memories of kittens—children holding kittens, watching kittens play, petting a kitten. Our memories are a meaningful whole. Trying to break them down into pieces is like cutting a kitten in half in order to understand it. Half a kitten isn’t really half a kitten. Breaking storytelling down into pieces, parts, and priorities destroys it.” (xviii)

If you go searching for explanations of stories, narrative, business narrative and storytelling, you will discover mountains of information that dissects the kitten into a million pieces. From our experience, there is one practical thing you need to know to be effective in business narrative; you must know how to identify a story.

A story is a set of events linked together in a way that explains what happened or what could happen. It differs from a clinic example because a story includes emotions and sensory detail.

“The King died and the Queen cried,” is a statement of fact.
“The King died and the Queen cried of a broken heart,” is a story.

Here’s a story from FedEx. They collect them to demonstrate employees exhibiting the company’s values.

In St. Vincent, a tractor trailer accident blocked the main road going into the airport. Together a driver and ramp agent tried every possible alternate route to the airport but were stymied by traffic jams. They eventually struck out on foot, shuttling every package the last mile to the airport for an on-time departure.

A story is detailed and specific and through these details people generalise and work out what’s happening and how to behave. When you become attuned to identifying stories, you will realised you’re surrounded by them.

Their ubiquity is due to our tendency to use stories to explain most things that happen around us. The boss comes down from the 26th floor to speak to Mary. “Jim must be down to talk to Mary about next week’s round of performance reviews.” It’s how we make sense of what’s happening.

Some people think a story must have a plot, character development, a protagonist, a turning point and a resolution. This might be true of a film script, a play, a novel etc. but in organisations, stories tend to be much smaller and inconspicuous. Stories can range from well-rehearsed retellings of a foundational moment in the organisation (the creation myths) to the smallest of utterances that immediately help people recall a story: “What happened, Fiona?” he asked. “Exactly what happened to Pedro 3 years ago,” Fiona replied. The Pedro story is replayed in everyone’s mind without anyone hearing it.

Most of the time business stories are short anecdotes recounting an event. Often these anecdotes are ephemeral, lost almost immediately after being told. Other times the anecdotes are enduring, a successful meme that is told and retold throughout the organisation. The enduring anecdotes shape the character of an organisation and are the most important stories to find.

http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2007/02/finding_success.html

 

Simmons, A. (2006). The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion Through the Art of Storytelling. New York, Basic Books.

Boje, D.M., D.B. Fedor, and K.M. Rowland. 1982. "Myth Making: A Qualitative Step in OD Interventions." The Journal of Applied Behavioural Science 18(1):17-28.

Tags: annette+simmons, fedex, david+boje

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Why use business narrative techniques?

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 17/03/07
Filed in Anecdotes.

Whenever someone asks me this question I tell them this story.

One of our first narrative projects was to help a government department assess their occupational health and safety practices to see whether their policy and procedures were being following and to determine their training needs. We formed two teams to collect our data, one used structured interview techniques and the other collected stories. At the end of the first day of data collection both teams got together to compare notes. “Well, looks like they pretty much have things together,” said the interview team. “They seem to follow the procedures and policies quite well.” The narrative team members looked at each other in amazement. “So you didn’t hear about the guys showering in their own urine because their recycling system is faulty or how in one workshop everyone wears protective shoes because a guy chopped the top of his foot off a while back but no one wears protective eye wear?”

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Nature of business narrative

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 13/03/07
Filed in Anecdotes.

Some people think a story must have a plot, character development, a protagonist, a turning point and a resolution. This might be true of a film script, a play, a novel etc. but in organisations stories tend to be much smaller and inconspicuous. Stories can range from well rehearsed retellings of a foundational moment in the organisation (the creation myths) to the smallest of utterances that immediately help people recall a story: “What happened, Fiona?” he asked. “Exactly what happened to Pedro 3 years ago,” Fiona replied. The story is replayed without anyone hearing it.

Most of the time business stories are short anecdotes recounting an event. Often these anecdotes are ephemeral, lost almost immediately after being told. Other times the anecdotes are enduring, a successful meme that is told and retold throughout the organisation. The enduring anecdotes shape the character of an organisation and are the most important stories to find.

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Ira Glass on the power of anecdotes

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 3/03/07
Filed in Anecdotes.

Ira Glass in a public radio producer and host of This American Life. In this video Ira describes the anecdote as one of the two basic building blocks of a story. He also demonstrates how compelling an anecdote is to listen to regardless of the information being conveyed. It’s one of the reasons why we like to listen to stories.

The second building block is time for reflection. While Ira is commenting on crafting a story, we use a similar construct in our work when we conduct sensemaking workshops which give leaders an opportunity to see patterns in a number of anecdotes and reflect of their meaning. This proceeds the act of designing interventions.

Tags: ira+glass

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Don't tell me what to do, tell me a story

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 27/02/07
Filed in Anecdotes, Business storytelling, Changing behaviour.

Last week I returned from my morning walk to find my 11–year-old daughter filling the blender with ice cream to make a banana smoothie. My first reaction was to say, “What are you doing eating ice cream for breakfast? That’s a bad habit to get into. It’s unhealthy. You should stop having ice cream for breakfast” The response was a dismissive grunt in my general direction. Hmmm, that didn’t go well.

After we sat down to eat breakfast I started to tell my daughter a story. “When I was in high school my parents really had no idea about healthy eating and we used to drink soft drinks all the time, ate lots of bread and hardly touched fruit.” Then the phone rang and I answered. When I returned to the table my daughter said, “go on, you were talking about when you were in high school.” I continued the story which conveyed the message that the habits you form now will be with you for the rest of your life. I made no mention of the smoothie.

A week has gone by and ice cream hasn’t featured on our breakfast table.

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Finding success stories

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 14/02/07
Filed in Anecdotes, Business storytelling, Quotes.

Have you ever been asked to find success stories and been unsure where to start? Done well success stories slide effortlessly from one teller to the next conveying company values, strategic directions and the good reasons why your company should invest in initiatives like communities of practice. Done badly the stories remain captive and moribund in content management jails.

What is a success story?

We have all heard the term ‘success story’ but what are we really talking about? First let’s take a look at a few examples.

In their Change This manifesto, Talking Strategy, Chip and Dan Heath retell this story from FedEx, the company that promises to deliver your package “absolutely, positively” overnight.

In St. Vincent, a tractor trailer accident blocked the main road going into the airport. Together a driver and ramp agent tried every possible alternate route to the airport but were stymied by traffic jams. They eventually struck out on foot, shuttling every package the last mile to the airport for an on-time departure. 

Here is one from SCORE—the counsellor's to America’s small business.

Judith Moore, a lifetime baker, was on a quest to find the “perfect” chocolate chip cookie recipe. Her son-in-law thought she should start her own business.

“I started investigating what it would take to start a cookie company,” she says.  Charlie Elberson, who owns an advertising agency, offered to develop a brand identity for her. In return, Judith would supply him with free cookies for a year.

Judith next contacted Coast SCORE in North Charleston, S.C., for advice on her business plan. SCORE Counselor Greg Kopatch helped her focus her vision. Greg also recommended that she create a spreadsheet and produce cash flow projections for three years of business.

His encouragement and enthusiasm helped to keep Judith going forward. “I could not have accomplished this much without SCORE’s help,” she says. Greg’s guidance was crucial to the completion of Judith’s business plan, as well as the necessary financial data to support it.

Greg continues to advise Judith on her ongoing business and its structure, business management and growth. And, it’s been a recipe for success. Judith recently entered into a new partnership with Dean & Deluca, a retail and catalogue gourmet food company based in New York City.

“It’s been a pleasure working with Greg, and a thrill to have all that information available to a small business, like we are, at no cost,” Judith says. “Having the expertise of SCORE counsellors is invaluable!”

And finally here is an example of a success story from Sun Microsystems.

SIM University (UniSIM) has to operate in a different manner than other educational institutions — the curricula, modules, programs, and even classes have to be flexible to enable students to strike a balance between work and study. The university recognised that it has to invest in its IT infrastructure to efficiently manage and operate an online e-learning solution to give its students a flexible learning environment. “Since we have decided to implement the e-learning infrastructure, it is increasingly critical that the system that supports this remains highly available and that the archives are easily managed,” says Gary Teo, Senior Manager of Educational Technology and Production for UniSIM. “We have to have systems that are always available so that our students can log in anytime, anywhere. We need something that is robust, stable and scalable. Most importantly, it must be cost-effective and highly reliable, which is why we turned to Sun.”

With almost everything online, learning becomes more flexible and interactive as students can now submit their assignments online, chat with their tutors and peers, download course materials online and even watch lectures online — from the comfort of their homes or wherever they happen to be. “We knew we made the right choice to go with Sun when the company took these seemingly irreconcilable requirements, customized them, and set up our infrastructure within a very short time,” adds Teo. “We are all very impressed.”

In order to run the Blackboard Academic Suite, the school put together an array of high-performance Sun products, including a storage area network (SAN) to house its mammoth database of lecture materials and administrative documents. To minimize the need for staff to manage the system, UniSIM acquired high-performance Sun Fire T2000 servers for high availability and automated recovery, and a Sun Fire X4100 server to support video streaming applications. To manage its database, UniSIM chose the Sun Fire V890 server. UniSIM’s critical storage and archive systems runs on a Sun StorageTek 6130 Storage Array and Sun StorageTek C2 Autoloader. As a result, UniSIM is now set for future archive expansion with additional arrays that can easily be added seamlessly.

Success stories come in all shapes and sizes but they share the trait of wishing to communicate, “look at us, look how clever, persistent, innovative [insert positive characteristic] we are.”  But that’s where the similarities end. The FedEx story can be told and retold—it’s an oral story. The cookie story is more like a journalist’s version of a ‘story’. Sun Microsystem’s is more like a case study. These three examples are a microcosm of the possibilities.

Most organisation have had experience writing case studies and commissioning journalists to write pieces for their corporate newsletters. As such, I would like to focus on the characteristics of oral stories and how to find them.

The first thing to notice about an oral story is their length. They’re short; an anecdote. While there are examples of storytellers retelling epics like Homer’s Iliad, mere mortals like us find it difficult to remember really long stories. A good oral success story is memorable. Its short length helps but there are more important features that make a story memorable.

People remember concrete details that create a picture of what’s happening in our mind’s eye. What did you see when you read the FedEx story? Did you see anything while reading the cookies or Sun stories? If the story recounts events we’ve seen before—airports, delivery truck, traffic jams—we can picture the story and it’s memorable. We simply replay the pictures to remember the story. If the scene is unfamiliar other devices are needed such as analogies, similes and metaphors. But, beware of the dead metaphor.

A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves (George Orwell, Politics and the English Language)

Or as F. Scott Fitzgerald noted: “The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned ‘character’ leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de Boulogue.” The Great Gatsby.

But this is not an essay on writing. We just want to be in a position to identify good success stories when and where we hear them. Some of the other characteristics to look out for include:

• a hero overcoming adversity
• detailed and concrete rather than vague and abstract
• simple and clear
• and most importantly, authentic and plausible

BHP Billiton, one of the world’s largest resources companies, justified its significant investments in communities of practice through the collection and retelling of success stories. They purposely created two versions of the same story: an oral retelling and a case study replete with detailed graphs showing savings, increased quality and reduced downtimes. Their most successful story is the rope shovel story. Here is how it was told to me.

In Ok Tedi there was a rope shovel, the largest moving machine on the planet, that was up and running 63% of the time. The very same type of rope shovel in a mine in Santiago had very little downtime by comparison and the Global Maintenance Network (the internal CoP for maintenance) wondered why. So they sent a team from Ok Tedi to Santiago to find out. After a few weeks with their colleagues in Santiago, they worked out that lubricant cleanliness made the difference. After changing their practices at Ok Tedi their rope shovel gradually improved its availability over a five year period saving BHP Billiton more than a million US dollars every year. And that was just one thing the Global Maintenance Network has done.

The details might be wrong but the message remains intact. The Global Maintenance Network is helping members improve their practices and saving the company significant money.

We could improve this success story by finding out the names of people who were involved and then tell it from their perspective. Some dates would make the story more concrete and verifiable. An analogy might help those of us who haven’t seen a rope shovel. I know its big, but how big? How about, a rope shovel would barely fit into the MCG and could be seen poking out above the stadium and be mistaken for an additional lighting tower. I guess this only works for Australians, but football stadium comparisons are always effective.

One last story before we look at how we find these examples.

Ruby S. presented with lower abdominal pain. She was tender in the right iliac fossa, and was therefore operated on as acute appendicitis. On opening the peritoneum there was a smear of turbid fluid, but the appendix was normal. Loop after loop of small bowel was pulled out, much to the irritation of the registrar, and there, in the upper jejunum, was a toothpick sticking through the wall. (Cox, 2001)

This story illustrates the effectiveness of an unexpected ending, the power of specific and visual language (loop after loop), and the need to use the language of the intended reader.

How do you find success stories?

The first step is to know what you’re after. Who are you trying to impress? What do they value? What is your purpose? Kathy Sierra recently posted a request for success stories which shows a woman who knows what she’s after.

The overall point is to find success stories about people whose lives have been affected by the web or software apps. I'm particularly interested in places where there is an intersection between live (face-to-face) interaction and online interaction (like people who've met online then forge off-line relationships). But even purely online experiences are important to me as well.

So here’s the first strategy. Ask for success strategies. This approach works when you have a large group of people listening. Kathy Sierra certainly has a large audience being one of the most popular bloggers in the world. You might have a similarly popular communication channel like a well-used intranet, email lists, or newsletters. But in large organisations this if often not an option. Broadcast communication channels are carefully guarded.

A good plan ‘B’ is to go to your social networks. Who are the connectors and mavens who know what is going on in the organisation? If you don’t have a well established network, I suggest you seek out roles that tend to be performed by natural connectors.

• Personal assistants
• Professional association leaders
• Community of practice leaders
Union reps
Successful business developers (connectors outside the organisation)
• Good (internal) head-hunters
• People who travel around the organisation

Social network experts say that we’re most effective in finding the people we are seeking by first exploring likely physical locations. “We need stories that illustrate good safety behaviours. Where are some of our most dangerous operations? Don’t we have operations the Ukrainian Donbas?”  The next place we should look is in the organisational structure. “Our mine operations people will have some good stories. The coal division would be a good place to start. Who heads up that division?” In combination with getting to know the company’s connectors you should be able to pin point a plethora of possibilities.

A way to use oral stories to target case studies

Many companies are obsessed with writing customer case studies. The Sun Microsystem example above gives you a feeling for what these case studies look like. When I worked at IBM we had an extensive case study database. These systems cost a fortune to maintain. And I have to tell you, I’ve never really found them that useful. I suspect because each case study requires so much effort to compile they are never done well. Here is an approach inspired by what I learned when I ran a photographic library.

Our photo library had over 100,000 photos. All the images were transparencies ranging from 35mm to large formats. It was impossible for us to catalogue the entire collection with the resources at our disposal. So we developed a general understanding of where groups of slides were physically located (which slide box) and when we sold a picture we catalogued it.

Oral success stories could represent an organisation’s first attempt at recording a success story. It’s essential that the oral story can be easily retold, just like the FedEx van driver story above. Some stories will be what Dan and Chip Heath call ‘sticky’, that is, they will be told and retold and eventually there will be a queue of people wanting the full case study. This is the signal to investigate and report the full story enabling a wisdom of crowds prioritisation of which case studies get written up and when.

 

Tags: success+stories

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Organisational stories

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 28/01/07
Filed in Anecdotes, Business storytelling.

A friend of a friend of our is a frequent business traveller. Let’s call him Dave. Dave was recently in Atlantic City for an important meeting with clients. Afterward, he had some time to kill before his flight, so he went to a local bar for a drink.

He’d just finished one drink when an attractive woman approached and asked if she could buy him another. He was surprised but flattered. Sure, he said. The woman walked to the bar and brought back two more drinks—one for her and one for him. He thanked her and took a sip. And that was the last thing he remembered.

Rather, that was the last think he remembered until he woke up, disoriented, lying in a hotel bathtub, his body submerged in ice.

He looked around frantically, trying to figure out where he was and how he got there. Then he spotted the note:

DON’T MOVE. CALL 911.

A cell phone rested in a small table beside the bathtub. He picked it up and called 911, his fingers numb and clumsy from the ice. The operator seemed oddly familiar with this situation. She said, “Sir, I want you to reach behind you, slowly and carefully. Is there a tube protruding from your lower back?”

Anxious , he felt around behind him. Sure enough, there was a tube.

The operator said, “Sir, don’t panic, but one of your kidneys has been harvested. There’s a ring of organ thieves operating in this city, and they got to you. Paramedics are on their way. Don’t move until they arrive.”

According to Chip and Dan Heath, this is one of the most successful urban myths. I hadn’t heard it before but I found myself retelling the story to my wife that afternoon. Chip and Dan use this story as an example of why some ideas travel and others don’t in their excellent book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. One of the reason this myth’s success is the simple fact that the information is conveyed as a story. It’s embedded with emotion. It’s surprising.

This got me thinking about the myths I hear in organisations. By myths I mean stories of larger than life characters that convey beliefs. They might be creation stories (how the organisation or community got started), heroic acts, tragedies, or amusing anecdotes that are frequently recounted.

Here’s one I heard the other day.

Our company has just done the mission, vision, values thing. The CEO, who came to us from one of our competitors, did most of the work. He went home on Friday, dug out the mission, vision and values statement from his old job, photocopied them on A3 sheets of paper and stuck them all over the wall on levels 22, 23 and 24.

Finding an organisation’s myths helps you understand the boundaries and constraints for any new interventions you might have planned. I’ve discovered that myth discovery is simply a matter of asking for stories that lots of people know. I was chatting to Dave Snowden about this last week and he suggested that you could also discover myths using his Sensemaker software by looking our for clusters of stories around particular archetypes. More on Sensemaker in a following post.

Let me leave you with one more myth from an organisation.

A new sales guys, Mike, starts at a Sydney company and he’s eager to make an impact. His boss says that the sales team in meeting in Jervis Bay (a coastal holiday spot about 3 hours drive from Sydney) on Monday morning at 9am. Mike gets up at 4am on Monday and drives down to Jervis Bay and on arrival calls his boss to get the specific location of the meeting.

On getting the call the boss says, “No, no, we are meeting in the Sydney office in a meeting room called Jervis Bay.”

What’s interesting about this seemingly innocuous story was how often we heard it told. I think it was an important story for the organisation that reminded people to ask questions and not just leap into things.

What myths are you aware of being told in your organisation?

Tags: communitiesofpractice, anecdote, myth

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The power of ordinary practices

Posted by Mark Schenk - 10/01/07
Filed in Anecdotes, Evaluation.

An article titled ‘The power of ordinary practices’ was the seventh ‘most read’ of Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge articles for 2006. The articles includes the following:

I believe it's important for leaders to understand the power of ordinary practices. Seemingly ordinary, trivial, mundane, day-by-day things that leaders do and say can have an enormous impact. My guess is that a lot of leaders have very little sense of the impact that they have.

One of our projects has involved collecting about 250 anecdotes from within a large multinational on the theme ‘values in action’. The anecdotes were used as part of a management development program. After short-listing the anecdotes, teams went through the most significant change process to identify anecdotes that provided the best examples of behaviours they should model. The following anecdote was selected as the most significant by one of the teams.

A great example, you go and - even impromptu if you just knock on [name's] door if you've got something you want to talk to him he will get up and he will move to his table and he'll give you his undivided attention.  I have experienced many other managers who will continue to type, will not always turn and look at you…

That something so innocuous has such impact reinforces the ‘impact of ordinary practices’. As we regularly comment – little things can make a big difference. But, you can tell managers this sort of thing a hundred (bazillion) times without it really sinking in. So, here we see some of the power of narrative – a simple anecdote has had a major impact upon a group of senior managers by giving them a powerful example of the effect their behaviour has on others. 

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The Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 19/10/06
Filed in Anecdotes.

We are very pleased to announce the release of a little eBook we have been working on called The Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles. Our aim for this book is to bring together the combined practical experiences of Anecdote in running anecdotes circles and presenting the information in a fun, easy to use format. You can download a copy from:

http://www.anecdote.com.au/AnecdoteCircles

Feel free to pass it on to anyone you think might find it useful and we look forward to your comments and suggestions.

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Story as a source of insight

Posted by - 28/09/06
Filed in Anecdotes.

Here is an anecdote from a senior executive from our recent survey which I just had to share. I’ve posted about the 5 ways in which stories are discouraged in organisations, as well as the 7 story forms which are valued in organisations. Paradoxically, but realistically, this anecdote contains elements of both of these, discouragement and value. This anecdote also reflects two of the key attributes which I think is vital to being a skilled storylistener. Patience and Hope. This senior executive appears to demonstrate both of these.

I have only been with this organisation for 2 months when I started I heard a lot of stories about the organisation. "The culture of this organisation is one that doesn't support it's staff!", "Management don't know what they want from us" and "You have a hard job ahead of you". These stories were greatly valued and encouraged by me but as a source of insight into organisational need and individual needs. These stories were, at the same time, not encouraged because there is a sense of constantly being negative, not seeing a way forward at all.

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Surveys, rewards and shame

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 27/09/06
Filed in Anecdotes.

Bob Sutton has a terrific post describing how Cedars-Sinai Medical Center got all their doctors to wash their hands. He main source for the post is a New York Times Magazine article called Selling Soap by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt.

The hospital started out with 65% compliance. [Now this percentage is thrown into question by some Australian research which showed that when doctors were asked, using a survey, whether they wash their hands, 73% said yes. When the researchers observed their behaviour they only detected 9% compliance. Here is another reason to be careful in using surveys to understand what’s happening in a social system.]

Back to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The first step they took was to reward anyone they saw washing their hands by handing out $10 Starbucks vouchers. This pushed compliance up to 85% but seemed to hit a ceiling.

They got the hospital up to nearly 100% by asking influential to place their hands in culture dish then photographing the bacteria and widely displaying the images, even putting one of the more disgusting as a screen saver for every computer in the hospital.

Both these examples are what I would call interventions. That is, a discrete, relatively small activities designed to change the system. It’s not a massive change program. It tackles one issue as a time and can make a huge difference. I think most large organisations get stuck into the mind-set of having to do the big programme—”we’re a big organisation, right!”

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Pictorial stories that convey values

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 5/09/06
Filed in Anecdotes.

A mining company just finished a traditional values exercise. You know the one, it ends up with a bulleted list of single words like integrity, diversity, professionalism. The designers quickly realised that their list wouldn’t mean much in the field so they started a project to collect stories from all their mine sites which illustrated the values. Each site agreed on the stories they thought reflected the values and then each story was illustrated and made into a poster. The genius of this intervention was in making posters specific to each mine site based on their stories AND not fully explaining the pictures on the posters. You had to be in the know to understand them. Visitors to the site would ask, “so what’re the scribbles all about?” “Ah, yep that’s the story about …” and the story illustrating one of the values is passed on. Prompted storytelling at its best.

This reminded me of visit back in 1991 to Chartres Cathedral and a memorable tour conducted by Malcolm Miller. I remember Miller describing each stained glass window as a series of stories from the bible and pointing out how the priests used these magnificent windows to both intimidate the audience and prompt the priests as to which stories to tell. This might be blasphemy, but it sounds a bit like PowerPoint.

[thanks to Jock Macneish for the mining story]

 

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The one about the conference call vandals

Posted by Shawn Callahan - 3/08/06
Filed in Anecdotes, Communities of practice.

John Smith tells an amusing anecdote about our conference call last week and makes some comments about conference calls and communities of practice.

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Management can kill a community of practice

Posted by Mark Schenk - 30/07/06
Filed in Anecdotes, Communities of practice.

I was reminded earlier this week of an event in 2000 when I was working for SMS consulting that demonstrated the dramatic and adverse impact that inappropriate management can have on a community of practice.

A small group of consultants interested in knowledge management had started meeting regularly and over several years the group had expanded to include members in all other SMS offices. While the company provided support in terms of facilities, beverages, food and permission, we were for a long time just tolerated rather than valued.  When the company realised that knowledge management had business potential and that their little CoP had developed methodologies, presentations, business development materials and had in fact completed a few projects, they decided to take this KM stuff seriously. So, they appointed a manager to ‘oversee’ the activities of the group. At his first meeting, the manager advised us to stop developing these materials and our new priorities were to be the development of a business case to justify our continued existence and a document development schedule. We were thrilled – NOT! As soon as we started making a difference we were to be diverted from work that contributed to our practice of KM. The next week most of the group didn’t turn up - same the week after. Fortunately, after a ‘either he goes or we go’ chat with the regional director, the new ‘oversight’  arrangements were removed.