From a story perspective, Christmas is a prolific time of year. As we gather with friends and families we recall the memories of the past and create new stories as presents are unwrapped, as turkeys emerge from the oven (or the Weber BBQ in the Schenk household), as Dads relive past triumphs with a half-century in the backyard cricket and, for some, as family members rub each other up the wrong way :-)

Stories help us reconnect with old memories, relive special moments and learn more about our friends and families. They also help turn strangers into friends.

Here are some questions that might help create a fun and story-filled festive season:

• What was your funniest moment in 2011?
• What was the high point of the year for you? What happened?
• Same question, but the low point.
• What was your best Christmas present ever?
• What was your most memorable Christmas ever?
• The best thing you have done this year?
• Which family traditions from your childhood have you continued with your own children?
• When was the last time you mentally wanted to punch someone at Christmas time?
• When did you realise that Santa is a fake and reindeer can't really fly?

Its also important to remember one of our favourite mantras - little things make a big difference. Now, I'm the first to admit I am not very good at this but I did something on Friday...a friend had surgery and was coming home around lunchtime. I went to her place and put on the breadmaker so she came home to the smell of fresh-baked bread. She was really pleased and a few days later I overheard her telling her parents on the phone about it...

We'd like to thank all the people we have worked with this year and all our friends, all over the world, who have helped make 2011 a rewarding and successful year.

Best wishes for the festive season and for a happy, healthy and successful 2012 from all of us at Anecdote

I found myself watching parliamentary question time today on TV (OK, I was tired. I did yoga for the first time last night). There were lots of questions about when exactly did the leaders of the government and the opposition know about Qantas CEO's, Alan Joyce, decision to ground his airline. It was a heated debate. (BTW, why can't anyone speak normally in parliament? Everthing is said in staccato, like a basketball coach shouting instructions to his team mid-game). Anyway, Anthony Albanese, the transport minister, steps up to the dispatch box and tells a story about how he was at Sydney airport after the planes were grounded and how he met a distressed American couple who were unable to get home. Now, we'll have to check Hansard tomorrow morning for the exact wording but Mr Albanese went on to say, "the woman was 43 weeks pregnant and needed to get home."

Sheenagh and I looked at each other and said, "43 weeks pregnant! What is she doing flying at 43 weeks? How is she 43 weeks pregnant? Maybe she's an elephant (OK, that was too harsh)." Gales of laughter float around our house. I note on the Qantas website this policy about flights over 4 hours, "For routine pregnancies, you can travel up to the end of the 36th week for single pregnancies and the end of the 32nd week for multiple pregnancies (e.g. twins)."

Mr Albanese's story failed the plausibility test.

Whenever we listen to a story we instinctively match the experience we're hearing with our own experience and if there's a significant mismatch the story's, and the storyteller's, credibility crumbles, no matter how true the event.

The plausibility test occurs as the story unfolds but we have another test we unconsciously make before the story hardly gets started: the relevance test.

Especially in business settings where everyone is pressed for time (That's what people say. I'm not convinced), if we know a story is about to be told we want to know there's a good chance it'll be relevant. To help the listener judge the potential relevance of a story we often prepend a short statement suggesting, or simply stating, the point of the story.

"The Qantas grounding was causing incredible distress for people. It was a good thing the government stepped in. I was in Sydney aiport on Sunday ... [the pregnant woman story]"

Sometime it just takes a slight slip up in facts to lose credibility with a story ... [The Anthony Albenese story of the 43-week pregnant woman]

With these two tests in mind business storytellers should be thinking of ways of conveying the relevance of their stories so they're afforded the air-time to recount their experiences.

They also should be thinking how to increase the plausibility of their story. Facts matter. Details matter. Names of people and places help. But most importantly will your audience believe what you're saying. The best advice comes from the master screenwriter and director Quentin Tarantino in this scene from Reservoir Dogs, lovingly called The Commode Story. Be warned: do not click on this link if you are offended by intense cursing or your workmates in the adjoining cubicles might be offended. The Commode Story.

I love short stories that say so much.

Being a Kiwi, this is an incredibly exciting time for me with the Rugby World Cup currently underway in New Zealand. As part of keeping up to date with all the current news about the cup, the teams and the players, I came across this blog on the BBC website from British journalist, Ben Dir.

Ben spent some time in the small (population 750) Canterbury town of Southbridge with a gentlemen named Neville Carter. Now for those of you who aren't aware of who Neville Carter is, he is the father for the current All Black Number 10, Dan Carter, one of the greatest players currently playing in world rugby.

Ben was trying to understand some more of where Dan Carter came from, what values helped shape him and what kind of person he really was by talking to his father, sister and people he grew up with. Neville Carter told this very short, and simple story that for me tells so much about Dan Carter and who he is as a person.

It was just after the devastating Christchurch earthquake of the 22nd of February, 2011;

"Daniel was staying with us for a few nights and he told us he had an appointment in town, but we found out he spent the day going round three retirement villages. He called in to see how they were, had a cup of coffee, found out how their knitting was going. We only knew about it because one of the old guys who used to play rugby out here rang me to say Daniel had just dropped in.

"Those old people had been through a horrific experience, so for an All Black to drop in and say g'day and have a yarn with them, it put a smile back on their faces. We're probably more proud of the things he does behind the scenes than what he does on the rugby field."

I just love the fact that very short, very simple stories can say so much.

What would you say is valued in this organisation?

A company that values 'fun' should be teaming with 'fun' stories. It's a little difficult, however, to have 'fun' stories without fun experiences.

We've developed a story-based approach for embedding values. Send us an email if you would like to explore using this approach in your organisation.

Sunday mornings is a favourite time of the week for me. I get up early and go walking with my friend Darren Woolley. The conversation is always lively and last Sunday I mentioned to Darren that I thought it was interesting that ambiguous stories seem to linger in my mind much longer than stories with a clear point.

"There is a reason for that," Darren says. "We're always trying to make sense of people's stories and if one is a little ambiguous we'll work a bit harder to work out its meaning. As a result we remember the story."

As soon as Darren said this I was reminded of the Heider & Simmel experiment where the subjects are shown a video of shapes moving about a screen. When they're asked to explain what's happening they mostly tell a story (the angry father finds his daughter with a boy and gets mad. The boy saves the girl and the father goes on a rampage). Every now and then someone quips, "they're geometric shapes moving on a two dimensional plane." I suspect these folk are the engineers.

With this idea in mind, that ambiguous or subtle stories linger almost beckoning a meaning to be found, I'm reminded of other examples. The first that jumps to mind is Limor Shiponi's story of the French businessman and the songbird (it's the first story on this podcast with Brother Wolf). I heard this story back in June last year and ever since then it nibbles away at my consciousness.

Another lovely example comes from Academy Award winning animator Shaun Tan and his book The Lost Thing. Ostensibly this is a children's picture book but there is much to learn here for business storytellers. Shaun tells a low key story about an exotic creature who seems lost. Like Limor's story we need to pay attention and mull over the meaning. It draws us in and holds us there.

Shaun also does something that I've seen Steve Jobs do, that is, understate the importance of his story. I'm paraphrasing here but Shaun starts The Lost Thing by saying, "There's no meaning in this story, no moral to learn. In fact I'm not really sure why I'm even telling this story." These types of statements seem like a challenge to me: "Come on, find meaning in this story. I dare you!"

Here's a classic example of understatement from Steve Jobs at his Stanford University commencement address: "Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal, just three stories." You can feel the audience leaning in to hear these three simple stories. "What can we learn? What do they mean?"

Now I'm not saying that business people should only tell ambiguous and subtle stories so their audience will remember and mull over them. To the contrary, most of the stories you should tell in the workplace should have a clear point (but please avoid telling your audience your point-it's much stronger if they work it out themselves). But every now and then a subtler story should be told and take a leaf out of Steve and Shaun's book and downplay your stories. Instead of saying, I've got this great (funny) story, perhaps introduce you stories in a way that invites the listener to seek out its meaning. And hopefully that will spark a conversation that benefits everyone.

Heider, F. & Simmel, M. 1944, 'An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior', The American Journal of Psychology, vol. 57, no. 2, pp. 243-59.

My engineering friends would say it like this...good intentions are a necessary but insufficient condition for success.

In my working life I have only ever met a handful of people who deliberately set out to humiliate, disempower, demotivate or otherwise disengage staff. Yet these are exactly the effects that many managers/leaders have. How can this be?

The answer, of course, is the 'knowing-doing gap'. Its the difference between what we intend as a result of actions and the impact that we have on people. But, can managers really be so lacking in self-awareness?

Apparently the answer is yes! In this article (registration required to access it) Lucy Kellaway from the London Financial Times describes an 18-month survey asking CEOs to list their 3 worst features. A staggering 97% list weaknesses that are really strengths, like 'I'm too trusting and accessible'. Lucy's conclusion is that the three worst traits of chief executives are a lack of self-knowledge, a lack of self-knowledge and a quite extraordinary willingness to give themselves the benefit of the doubt.

The Economist recently published this story:

So, step 1 needs to focus on getting leaders to acknowledge their faults and to focus on their impacts rather than their intentions. This is the first objective in our leadership programs. We expose participants to an equal number of positive and negative examples around engagement and the impact of manager behaviour. Participants are asked to identify what they think are the best examples and the ones that are worst. We also ask them to identify any examples where, as a manager, they have done this themselves or something like it. They identify these anecdotes by placing a blue dot on them.

The results are spectacularly conclusive. Over 75% of the blue dots are placed on the positive examples. Another way of saying this is that the participating managers consider themselves nearly four times more likely to generate positive experiences than negative ones. If this assessment were accurate it would probably be a pretty good place to work and employee engagement would be high. Unfortunately, in all four cases, employee engagement was moderate at best (between 40% and 60% of staff being ‘engaged’).

Our next step is to show these leaders a tag cloud (produced using Wordle) of the tags for all the examples collected in their organisation. A tag cloud of the aggregated data is shown below.

As the tag cloud shows, on average staff relate four times as many negative experiences as they do positive ones. This is almost the inverse of the managers' self-assessment. For many leaders this comes as a revelation - they need to change their behaviour for staff engagement to improve. They need to look past their intentions and focus on the impact they are having in the workplace.

The data has been collected from over 250 leaders from four large organisations between 2008 and 2011.

This story was told the other day by General David Petraeus (The head of all international forces in Afghanistan) just before a press conference illustrating the meaning of true importance.

HT to Victoria Ward. Source: The Guardian

We developed TheStoryTest.com to help you build your skill to identify stories. Quite frankly it's hard to be a good storyteller if you can't tell the difference between a story and say, an opinion, or an analogy or even a case study. A good storyteller's ears prick up as soon as one starts and they also notice when no stories are being told. TheStoryTest.com has 10 examples of stories and non-stories and your job is to decide which is which. At the end you'll get a score and get a link to the answers. We want as many people as possible in every organisation in the world to build their story intelligence. It will help bring more humanity to organisations.

TheStoryTest.com was born from the observation that many good folk who came to our Storytelling for Business Leaders training couldn't say for certain when a story was told. Probably about 70% were either unsure or totally off base. By the way, if you were wondering if I 've told any stories so far in this post, the answer is no.

Just this week I was reminded of just how poor we are at seeing stories. Like everyone else in the story business I'm excited about Peter Guber's new book on storytelling, Tell to Win. So when I discovered he was interviewed by Harvard Business I clicked on over and watched the 6 min video. I joked to my colleague Kevin before watching it saying "wouldn't it be funny if he didn't tell any stories." Well you could bowl me over with a fluffy croissant; there wasn't a single story in sight. A number of friends also sent me this video and I replied back saying how remarkable it was that Peter didn't tell any stories and on more than one occasion my correspondent replied to the effect, "bloody hell, I didn't even notice."

By the way, the problem is rarely an inability to see enough stories, rather we often see stories in everything, even when there are none to be found. It's because we humans are all story creating creatures who make up stories to explain anything that doesn't quite make sense. We feel safer if we have the story.

Now, you are probably wondering, so what makes a story (and I don't mean what makes a good story--that's another thing altogether)? Before we answer that question go and try your skill on TheStoryTest and then we will point you to the basics of how to spot stories. Once you can do it consistently your storytelling will take off.

I recently read a fascinating account of how story collection made a real difference in America winning the Second World War (or at least their part in it). Rob Yeung tells the story about the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) and the psychologist John C. Flanagan in his recent book The Extra One Per Cent.

This story for me underpins a lot about what initially attracted me to Anecdote. Having an approach built around really understanding and making sense of what is going on through collecting real life, specific examples before rushing straight to solutions is one that just seems to make sense for me. It also reminds me of the power of making things concrete, and how abstractions, opinions and beliefs can 'get in the way' of understanding and clarity.

This USAAF/Flanagan story is certainly one I will be telling in the future to help make the point about the power story collection can have.

(1) Flanagan, J. C. (Ed.). (1947). The aviation psychology program in the Army Air Force (Research Report 1). Washington, DC: US Army Air Forces Aviation Psychology Program

Last week I was in Yeppoon in Queensland delivering a keynote and workshop on collaboration at an innovation in government forum. In the workshop I used an activity mentioned by Bob Sutton in his new book 'Good Boss, Bad Boss'. Bob is also the author of 'The No Asshole Rule' that we have blogged about a few times.

The activity used an age-old prioritisation game called Survival on the Moon (you can find the instructions here). Groups are asked to prioritise fifteen items to survive after a crash-landing on the moon. Everyone does it individually, then they do it as groups (hopefully getting a better result). The interesting twist in Sutton's book is organising the groups with a hierarchical spread (executives through to junior staff) and then giving the most junior person the answers in advance. They are asked to argue strongly for what they know to be the right answers without revealing they have the correct answers. The scoring system is based on the variance of group priorities from the NASA-provided ones.

In my workshop there were nine tables with about six people at each one. Five tables had one of the junior people with the correct answers. The results were very interesting.

• Groups with answers at their table scored an average of 31 (NASA rates this score as 'good')
• Groups without answers scored an average of 36 (NASA rates this as 'average')
• The best score was 21 which NASA rates as excellent. This group observed that the reason they did so well was because there were no men in their group
• Two groups scored 26 - one group had the answers and one of them didn't
• Two of the groups with the answers scored relatively badly. In both groups, the person with the answers observed that "no-one listened to me" or "I couldn't get a word in".
• Several groups commented that people who were more senior, and people with higher educational qualifications, tended to dominate. This is consistent with Sutton's observation on page 131 of Good Boss, Bad Boss' that some bosses 'wield excessive influence...even when they spew out nonsense...and insisting they are right even when they are dead wrong'.

So, none of the tables that had the answers got anywhere a perfect score, though they scored, on average, better than groups without the answers.

One thing this highlights for me is the need to do some more reading on the effect of gender on collaboration. I will definitely do this exercise again. Next time I will record the individuals scores as well as the group ones.

My daughter and I recently watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show and our DVD has the option to play the audience participation sound track while you watch the movie. It brought back fond memories from the early eighties going to screenings where we would take our rice, water pistols, confetti and newspapers and for every line in the movie we would call out an irreverent line or two. Great fun.

On re-watching the movie you can't help noticing just how flimsy it is: weak plot, poor acting, clumsy directing. When it was first released it was roundly panned by the audiences and critics alike. But then something happened. People started having fun with it and audience participation emerged and next thing you know you have a cult classic.

I'm willing to bet that one of the reasons why audience participation emerged is that the Rocky Horror Picture Show is an imperfect story and therefore leaves space for the audience to add in their own content. Compare this with a beautifully crafted movie such as Million Dollar Baby. Can you imagine audience participation happening? OK, that's not a fair comparison so think about some musicals: Chicago, Westside Story, Hairspray. Again the only participation here is singing along to the songs.

Crafting perfect stories is unlikely to get the participation you were hoping for in your business. I'm finding comms departments particular obsessed with the perfect story approach. Comms folk have been in the business of crafting and disseminating company messages and in most cases they are in broadcast mode. So when they encounter storytelling they are often preoccupied with learning how to tell the best story. What are the features of a great story? How do we help our leader tell a compelling story? How will we hook our audience and engage them emotionally? All good questions but it's only applying one approach to story work and I can guarantee if you spend too much effort crafting the perfect story your audience wont participate in the conversation you are hoping they might have. You will have created a Million Dollar Baby that no one wants to mess with.

Contrast the perfect story approach with what happened in one of our leadership programs. We collect 100 stories from staff of good and bad leadership. Verbatim stories: just the way they spoke them. The workshop participants have to decide which story is most significant in terms of staff engagement. Two stories bubble to the surface. Both stories are anaemic in story terms. The one they chose is about a woman who whenever she goes to her manager's office he's working on his computer, very focussed on his computer screen. But when he sees her he stops what he is doing, comes over to the table in the middle of the room, sits down and engages her like that's the only thing on his mind. She finishes the story by saying that she reeeally appreciates it and no other managers do it in the company. That story generates heaps of discussion but more importantly we see the conversation triggering new behaviours in the organisation. The story is not pretty. It's not perfect. But it has a lasting impact.

So in business story work let's not get so obsessed with the perfect story. Let's leave that to the Aaron Sorkins and Clint Eastwoods of this world. In business story work we need to trigger conversations that reveal new stories and really engage our people in storytelling.

This is just one of many example Barrie Cassidy gives of Kevin Rudd being, as Professor Robert Sutton calls, a bosshole: someone who leaves followers disrespected, emotionally damaged and de-energized. Cassidy paints a dismal portrait of Rudd as someone who is primarily concerned for himself, someone who seeks the limelight and someone who is obsessed with trying to control everything that might impact his image. According to Cassidy the dislike for Rudd among his colleagues was so great that when the challenge came to overthrow him as prime minister the numbers flowed to Gillard so quickly and overwhelmingly in her support there wasn't even a need for a vote.

I'm really hoping that Kevin Rudd's behaviour detailed in this book is an exception in politics because we can't expect our country to be governed effectively if our prime minister intimidates his staff and ministerial colleagues to the point where no one is willing to disagree or debate the issues which are going to affect millions of Australian's lives. It seams to me that outrageous bosshole behaviour is diminishing rapidly in our corporations I'm pleased to say. In most cases (I wish I could say in all cases) bosses are held to account. That's not to say we can't slow down our efforts to call appalling behaviour. I just hope this book helps those people in politics to realise it's time to dial back the arrogance and direct their power to making a difference for their constituents.

I read this book in two days, which is unusual for me. I found the stories gripping. It's an easy read. The first two-thirds chronicle the period leading up to the 2010 election from the point where Malcolm Turnbull's loses the opposition leadership and the role Godwin Gretch. Then the rise of Tony Abbot at the new opposition leader and his shaky start. But the majority of part 1 of The Party Thieves is focussed on Kevin Rudd. His 2007 election win, his temper and bad behaviour, Julia's rise, and the dismissal. The last third is a diary of the 2010 election interspersed with recollections from Barrie about his days as Bob Hawke's press secretary.

I suspect this book is going to create a lot of controversy. Highly recommend it.

I spend an enjoyable day yesterday at the AFR leadership conference in Sydney. The first speaker was Alex Malley, CEO of CPA Australia. Alex noted that all of us have childhood experiences that shape our views on leadership. He told a story about his first leadership experience. My recollection of his story is as follows:

When I was 12 years old, my mum was in hospital, very sick. The first time I went in to visit her I was on my own, and a bit overwhelmed. Walking down the corridors, looking for the right room and finally finding it. When I entered the room I wasn't sure what to do. The cleaner looked up and saw this 12-year-old boy obviously looking quite apprehensive. He came over to me and said “you must be Alex. Your mom has told me everything about you, she's very proud of you. Your mum is very sick right now but it's important that you know that she loves you very much."

Many people I spoke to during the day commented on this story and how powerful it was. It just goes to show that a simple example such as this can convey powerful messages that stick in people's minds. It's also a good example of how leadership can be displayed by anyone in an organisation.

How do you remember so many stories? I get this question a lot and for some time I didn't really know the answer. I certainly believe stories are important, that they are memorable, help you connect with your audience and all the other many benefits we talk about on this blog. But how does one remember the right story when you need it? In the last few of months I worked out a critical element.

We've been working with the Victorian Bushfire Recontruction and Recovery Authority (VBRRA) for a number of months now and back in July I facilitated an event of 200+ Community Recovery Committee (CSC) leaders to help them better connect across their 33 CSCs. We helped them share their stories to make new connections.

In preparation for the event I met with Christine Nixon (then VBRRA Chairman) and Ben Hubbard (CEO) and described our story-based approach and ask whether they would like to share a story or two with me. Christine told me this.

After hearing this story I was out in the corridor talking to Deb, who worked with Christine, and asked what the story meant for her. Deb said that it was an example of how good things can come out of terrible situations. She also said it showed that corporate involvement can make a difference. For me I thought it was an example of how small things can make a big difference. And then it struck me, this is an important practice for remembering stories: you need to ask yourself what an experience or story means, what's the point of this story?

But knowing the point of a story doesn't guarantee you'll remember it. It does, however, provide a trigger for the story to be retold and the retelling reinforces those synaptic pathways that help you remember the story.

This experience made me realise that I often ring Mark (my business partner) and tell him a story I've just heard and we talk about the point of the story and when we might retell it. Inadvertently we had created a story remembering practice.

Yes, we also record our stories, albeit briefly. And The Story Finder helps. But there is nothing better to be able to illustrate a point with an example on the fly and having these stories in your head makes all the difference

I'm in Singapore at the moment. Had an amazing time last week because I spent three days with many of the story practitioners I really admire at the Origins Business Narrative Conference and learned heaps.

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.

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.

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

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/

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.

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:

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Congratulations on doing TheStoryTest—and if you haven't done it, reading this blog post now is tantamount to cheating—shame on you :-)

Here are the quick answers. Below we will explain why each example is or is not a story.

1. Pizza innovation - no
2. Basement flood at Tree Hill - yes
3. Hewlett Packard's European operations - no
4. The role of a leader - no
5. Gloves on the boardroom table - yes
6. Pin board of movie directors - yes
7. Tappers and listeners - yes
8. Mark Burnett's bathtub 'story' - no
9. Peter Lowry Technical and Quality Coach - no
10. Suggesting a Caesar salad at Southwest - yes

Spotting a story—a practical definition of a story

Many story aficionados will be unhappy with our practical definition of a story because in their mind it doesn't illustrate the shear beauty and intricacy of stories. And they would be right. This definition is a practical one for spotting stories. It says nothing about what makes a good story, a subject as deep an Borges' fabled library.

At its most basic level a story is when someone does something, somewhere, at some time and usually for some reason. In other words a story describes an event (or sequence of events) at a place and time featuring one or more characters who take some action for some purpose. A story is about something that happened or might happen. What's happening now is life.

There are four features to look out for to spot a story:

1. Time marker: stories often start with a time marker such as "In 1991 ..." "Just the other day" "Last Tuesday ..." "When we last spoke to the CEO ..." The archetypal time marker is, of course, "Once upon a time" but I find this opening less common in a business context.
2. Place marker: sometimes a story will start with a place marker such as "We were outside Jim's office ..." "At basketball ..." "On our way to the client ..."
3. Characters: stories feature people (or other people-like entities such as Thomas the Tank Engine) doing things. They have names, speak and take action.
4. Events: stories have one or more events. These events might be moments in time or scale up to eons.

This should be enough to spot a story. So here are the ones in TheStoryTest.com

Examples that were stories

Story two - Basement flood at Tree Hill

This is a story we collected in an Anecdote Circle. It's exactly how someone told it. It starts with a place marker "the basement at Tree Hill." Then the the teller talks about his manager, Smithie, and how he deals with mistakes.

Story five - Gloves on the boardroom table

The first paragraph is context setting so we haven't got to the happening yet. Then the story starts with "I asked one of our summer students ..." A character doing something for some purpose.

Story six - Pin board of movie directors

"Arriving in Hollywood in the late '60s" is the time marker but the real action starts in the third paragraph when Peter is organising his pin board of directors.

Story seven - Tappers and listeners

This story clearly starts with a time marker, "In 1990 ..." and then tells us about an experiment conducted by Elizabeth Newton. The story really only extends for the first two paragraphs and the following three paragraphs are the implications drawn from the story.

Story ten - Suggesting a Caesar salad at Southwest

In this case we start with the character "Herb Kelleher" and the time marker "once told someone". This is a good example of a specific moment because we are hearing what Herb actually said. It is also an example of a story inside a story. When Herb gives his example he tells the story of Tracy from marketing, which we can assume is a fictional story based on things that could happen. A very good teaching story as well.

Examples that were NOT stories

Story one - Pizza innovation

This example is close to a story but is not quite there because it is mainly a set of opinions: "innovation is key", "the team identified a very simple but enormously powerful insight", "you really do need to worry about Mum losing out all the time." There are some near story components but told at a high level and therefore loses its impact: "The team go out of the office ..." "Initially launched as the Quad ..."

Story three - Hewlett Packard's European operations

Now you could be fooled into thinking this was a story because is starts our with a character (HP's European operation) and a time marker (in the late 1990s) but by the second sentence we move to a viewpoint about the idea rather than what happened. The rest of the paragraph is then opinions about how the French would react to the Belgians. We selected this one because it has the feeling of a story without really being one.

Story four - The role of a leader

Hopefully you got this one easily. It is straight forward rhetoric with no story elements.

Story eight - Mark Burnett's bathtub 'story'

The first two paragraphs are context. Then the third paragraph says we are going to hear a story. But what we are told is an analogy about a bath tub and not a story at all.

Story nine - Peter Lowry Technical and Quality Coach

This is a good example of what some PR and corporate communications people think is a story but is merely a description of someone with some of their opinions. Nothing happens.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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'.

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.

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.

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...

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

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.

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?

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."

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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?

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...

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.

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.

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.

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?

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!

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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).

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."

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.