| 13/11/08 | | Fired up and ready to go |
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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| 12/11/08 | | Metaphors everywhere |
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
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| 7/11/08 | | Creating a culture where people have conversations |
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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| 7/10/08 | | Values in action stories |
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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| 3/10/08 | | Common Ground and the Role of Stories |
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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| 2/10/08 | | Practising the art of creating possibilities |
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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| 27/09/08 | | Brand stories |
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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| 12/09/08 | | Social media demands honesty |
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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| 3/09/08 | | Emotion, memory and stories |
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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| 23/08/08 | | Be careful who you despise |
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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| 6/08/08 | | Imbuing your workplace with stories |
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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| 27/07/08 | | Blind Men and the Elephant |
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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| 27/07/08 | | The stonecutters and the cathedral builder |
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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| 26/07/08 | | What an artist and computer scientist can do with stories |
Jonathan Harris loves playing around with stories and in this 20 minute presentation at the 2007 TED he gives three examples of his work. He seems facinated with how you can collect stories and them represent then using computer graphics.
The project I found most interesting, and it was reminiscent of Cognitive Edge's ground-breaking work in graphically representing stories (check out their Sensemaker software), is his Whale Hunt project. Jonathan describes the Whale Hunt 5:50 min from the start of this video. On a 9-day visit to the Arctic he takes a photo every 5 minutes, day and night, and then displays these photos in a variety of ways (http://thewhalehunt.org/).
I'm certain you will enjoy this video. I also loved the third project exploring happiness in Bhutan.
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| 28/06/08 | | Leaders need to listen |
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 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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| 22/06/08 | | Innovators are a bad choice for change |
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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| 30/05/08 | | A mystery story that explains irrational behaviour |
Over at the Bumble Bee, Ken Thompson provides an excerpt of Ori Brafman forthcoming book, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior.
It's a terrific tale of how a very rational airline pilot can act irrationally under pressure.
A growing body of research reveals that our behavior and decision making are influenced by an array of such psychological undercurrents and that they are much more powerful and pervasive than most of us realize. The interesting thing about these forces is that, like streams, they converge to become even more powerful. As we follow these streams, we notice unlikely connections among events that lie along their banks: the actions of an investor help us to better understand presidential decision making; students buying theater tickets illuminate a bitter controversy in the archeological community over human evolution; NBA draft picks point to a fatal flaw in common job-interview procedures; women talking on the phone show why a shaky bridge can be a powerful aphrodisiac.
Charting these psychological undercurrents and their unexpected effects, we can see where the currents are strongest and how their dynamics help us understand some of the most perplexing human mysteries. These hidden currents and forces include loss aversion (our tendency to go to great lengths to avoid possible losses), value attribution (our inclination to imbue a person or thing with certain qualities based on initial perceived value), and the diagnosis bias (our blindness to all evidence that contradicts our initial assessment of a person or situation). When we understand how these and a host of other mysterious forces operate, one thing becomes certain: whether we're a head of state or a college football coach, a love-struck student or a venture capitalist, we're all susceptible to the irresistible pull of irrational behavior. And as we gain insight about irrational motives that affect our work and personal lives, fascinating patterns emerge, connecting seemingly unrelated events.
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| 29/05/08 | | The head office pattern |
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 very 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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| 26/05/08 | | Lost knowledge? |
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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| 20/05/08 | | Finding customer stories |
Every organization has a set of values, most even live by them, but how many have successfully embedded the right behaviors 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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| 11/05/08 | | The one-arm boy |
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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| 11/05/08 | | The difference between knowledge and information |
"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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| 8/05/08 | | Melbourne taxis and Sydney taxis |
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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| 23/04/08 | | Workplace diversity |
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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| 15/04/08 | | Leading from the front...complexity management basics for CEOs |
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.Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 10/04/08 | | The Mistake Bank |
John Caddell has an interesting project he's just started called The Mistake Bank. It's a place to tell stories of some of your biggest stuff ups with the idea we learn best from our mistakes.
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| 17/03/08 | | How stories create culture |
It's said that stories create cultures; they propagate the assumptions and beliefs throughout the group in question. But it is specifically stories that create culture or is it something else?
Before we answer this question it's useful to have a definition of what we mean by 'a story'. Here's a definition I like from Annette Simmons latest book, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins.
"Story is a reimagined experience narrated with enough detail and feeling to cause your listeners' imaginations to experience it as real."
Hearing a story is the second-best way to gain experience and in many cases it's the only available option. Sometimes it's too dangerous to gain first hand experience or the opportunity to gain first hand experience never presents itself. So the idea that a story is reimagined experience is important and useful. And the impact of a story is heightened the more real it seems.
So imagine the following:
A group of colleagues gather around a meeting room table. The meeting hasn't started and everyone is laughing and joking. Billy, a seasoned salesman, bursts into the room with a huge grin of his face.
"I've just come from the Sam Cook meeting [the CIO of a large government department]. They signed on the original price--they didn't screw us down. We will make out quota," Billy said. "And all we had to do was offer a service they were going to get anyway.... What they don't know wont kill them right?"
The group cheers while slapping Billy on the back in congratulations.
What just happened here?
Was it the story that created the culture? Did Billy's retelling of what happened with Sam create or reinforce the culture?
No, in this case the story is the trigger, but it's the response to the story that shows everyone how we behave around here.
This is an important point for leaders. Leaders must be poised to lead a response to stories told. To disrupt a response if necessary. For leaders this is about self awareness and being aware of the stories being told (which means being able to identify stories) and observing how people respond--and being ready and willing to intervene.
In a complex environment it's important to reinforce the behaviours you want and disrupt what's unfavourable and if you want to change the culture of a group, start by changing the response to the stories being told.
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| 28/02/08 | | An anecdote's point of view |
Ford Harding has just posted two versions of the same anecdote. The first paints the consultant as the hero while the second focusses 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.
| 27/02/08 | | Anecdote's will be checked and re-checked |
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.
| 24/02/08 | | Knowledge management lessons |
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 managementView 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.
| 22/02/08 | | Everyone has a story... |
...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.
| 4/02/08 | | Why is presentation important? |
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 disheveled. 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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| 31/01/08 | | BHP Billiton axes its Knowledge Networks |
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.
| 22/01/08 | | World Trade Center and emergency services mis-coordination |
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.
| 22/01/08 | | The role of a story in lessons learning |
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