Recent research quoted in the fantastic Psyblog has shown the benefits of telling ourselves the whole, complete and detailed story, rather than just select bits from it.

Ruby et al. (2011) (*1) found the benefits of this approach in regards to exercise. They asked a group of people to think about an upcoming exercise session. Each person tried to predict how much they would enjoy their workout. Then after the workout they rated their enjoyment again.

On average people's predictions were too pessimistic: they actually enjoyed their workouts more than they had guessed. This was true across men and women and across all age ranges. It was true for both moderate and challenging workouts and whether people exercised on their own, in a group or amongst others in the gym.

The reason the researchers put forward was that people focused heavily on the relatively unpleasant start of the exercise session rather than the more enjoyable middle section. They christened this effect 'forecasting myopia'.

As you can imagine, if people think they will dislike something then they are less likely to want to do it. It can hardly be a motivating factor to think something is far less enjoyable than it actually is.

So how do you overcome it? You tell yourself the whole story.

In a final study Ruby et al. asked people to think about their whole exercise routine, including the warm-up, the main workout and cool-down. It emerged that this method encouraged people to make more positive predictions of how much they would enjoy their exercise. This also had the effect of boosting people's intention to exercise in the future.

So it seems that telling ourselves the whole, complete and detailed story can both increase our view of how much we will enjoy exercise, and also boost our desire to want to do it. But does this view stack up in other fields? Could this approach help us in making good buying decisions?

Let's look at some examples outlined in a recent article on Psyblog. See if you can spot the pattern:

• A camping holiday seems like fun when you abstractly imagine escaping the rat-race and getting back to nature. It doesn't seem so much fun when you're stuck in a cold, wet field, desperate for a proper hot meal.


• A big, expensive DSLR seems like a good idea when you think about the amazing high-res photos you'll be able to take. But it turns out you can't be bothered to carry a big, heavy camera around all the time, so in reality it doesn't get used much.


• You imagine that buying a wreck of a house and doing it up means you can realise your perfect lifestyle vision. When you move in and start work, all you really want is to get rid of the dust and mess and have a normal life: your vision is forgotten.


• Unfortunately when we plan our purchases we tend to make the mistake of thinking in the abstract and forgetting about the day-to-day details. The further off in time and space they are, the more abstractly we think about them.

One of the problems of thinking abstractly about our purchases is that we tend to forget about the gritty details. And it's the details that have the ability to make us either happy or unhappy. We know this because research finds that our happiness is predicted better by the details of our everyday lives than it is by our overall life circumstances (see Kahneman et al. 2004 (*2) and Kanner et al., 1981 (*3)).

To make purchases that will give us the most happiness we need to think as concretely as possible. It might not sound as fun, but thinking about how we're going to use the item or service on a daily basis is more likely to guide us towards the choice that will make us the happiest. We can buy smart by telling ourselves the whole, complete and detailed story.

In their book Change Anything, Patterson et. al. carry on this theme by putting forward a change strategy they call 'Tell the whole vivid story'. It is very much along similar lines as the two examples I have given above.

As an example, they tell the story of Michael, an ex-alcoholic;

"When I'm watching TV, and an advertisement will come on showing a group of people enjoying a martini in a piano bar. To this day that commercial can put my thoughts heading in a dangerous direction. My natural inclination is to start thinking "I can do that". Sure I am a recovering alcoholic, but why not enjoy a social drink with friends? What harm can that be? "But it's not my story, nor is it the whole story. My story plays out differently. if I join the group at the piano bar, I'll drink the martini. Then I'll be back tomorrow. Then I'll shift to hard liquor. I'll soon be on a binge, and one day I'll wake up lying in my own vomit or maybe even in jail. And by the way, that's not merely what might happen to me. That's what will happen to me".

So there are many benefits in telling ourselves the whole, complete and detailed story, rather than just select bits from it. Think about how you could use this in your work or personal life. Are you telling yourself the whole story around doing your expenses, or just focusing on the most unpleasant aspects? Are you thinking about a new role in abstract terms, without really thinking of the day-to-day aspects of the job and whether they are what you want to do? Are you thinking about how a project might roll out, and not telling yourself the 'whole vivid story' of the challenges and difficulties you might face?

(*1) Ruby, M; Dunn, E; Perrino, A; Gillis, R; and Viel, S: (2011) The invisible benefits of exercise in Health Psychology, Vol 30(1), Jan 2011, 67-74.

(*2) Kahneman, D; Krueger, A; Schkade, D; Schwarz, N and Stone, A:(2004) A Survey Method for Characterizing Daily Life Experience: The Day Reconstruction Method in Science 3 December 2004: 306 (5702), 1776-1780.

(*3) Kanner, A., Coyne, J., Schaefer, C., and Lazarus, R. (1981): Comparison of two modes of stress measurement: Daily hassles and uplifts versus major life events in Journal of Behavioral Medicine. Volume: 4, Issue: 1

In using story-work to build a brand, engage employees, or for one of its many other purposes, organisations nearly always focus on storytelling. The meme is strong because the act of storytelling is so powerful. But to focus solely on this one aspect of story-work severely limits the benefits. The most valuable application of this technique combines storytelling with story-listening and story-triggering. Together, these processes create the conditions for enduring and healthy change.

Story-listening

Back in 2005, I introduced the readers of the Anecdote blog to the concept of story-listening (it might even have been the first time the term was used). Story-listening is the process of eliciting and collecting stories, helping groups to draw meaning from those stories, and then, most importantly from a business perspective, creating opportunities for the stories to inspire employees to take positive, transformational action.

Story-listening may sound passive, but it does not involve people merely sitting back and listening to their company's stories in the same way that they might enjoy their favourite podcasts. It is all about helping those who can most influence change understand what's really happening in their organisation, and then inspiring them to do something about it. All good business story-work is purposeful.

Let me give you an example. Earlier this year, one of Australia's biggest accounting firms contacted Anecdote for help. They'd just done their employee engagement survey, and while many parts of the business were in good shape, there were several areas that revealed a need for improvement. The problem, however, was that the survey results didn't make it clear what might be creating the lower engagement scores. Broad themes like reward and recognition, communication and leadership behaviour had been flagged, but the organisation remained uncertain as to exactly which behaviours needed changing - or, for that matter, which behaviours were working nicely.

We started the project by collecting stories from a good cross-section of the firm and managing them in our Zahmoo story bank. We then assembled a group of influential employees from across the business and ran a workshop to help them work out for themselves the patterns of behaviour they wanted to reinforce and the conduct they wanted to correct - the stories we'd collected gave the employees many concrete examples of specific behaviours that either helped or hindered employee engagement. Once the important patterns where identified, we helped the group to design targeted interventions that would prompt constructive, lasting change.

All the stories you hear at work reflect your organisation's culture. You cannot change this culture without changing the stories being told and retold in your workplace. Then, once you've initiated new behaviours, new stories will flow. Story-listening helps you become aware of the current corporate narratives - it helps you to clearly hear the dominant stories, the prevalent archetypes, the repeating plot lines. Most importantly, because you are working with stories, your feelings are engaged, and these feelings inspire you to take action. Story-listening gives you the essential ingredients for change: decisions makers who both understand what's going on AND who are emotionally moved to make a difference.

Story-triggering

We all act in accordance with our beliefs, attitudes and values, which together form our view of life - or in terms of organisational culture, our view of work. This view is shaped and reshaped by what happens to us and how we interpret those experiences, and we reinforce those interpretations by telling ourselves stories and acting in accordance with them.

One of the first projects we did at Anecdote was to investigate the issue of trust in a bank's call centre. The call centre manager told us that when she'd first joined the section, she'd held the strong belief that all she had to do to get something done was to simply ask someone to do it and get their verbal agreement. But within her first week on the job, a colleague pulled her aside and advised her that, to get anything done, she should really email the person she was tasking and document her request, cc-ing all the relevant managers to ensure there was an obvious paper trail. At first this seemed crazy to the manager, and it offended her belief in the personal, friendly and trusting management style she had cultivated over many years, so she refused to adopt this approach. However, within another three weeks, after a series of incidents, the manager was emailing all of her tasking requests.

The dominant story at this call centre was that if you just relied on face-to-face requests, your words would be twisted or ignored and the job wouldn't get done, so you needed to maintain a paper trail as evidence. The centre's manager lived this negative story, multiple times, and eventually adopted it in place of her optimistic personal conviction. This was a sign of a very unhealthy workplace. What needed to happen here was that the employees needed to be subjected to new experiences that generated a fresh, positive governing story, and this is exactly the objective of story-triggering.

The simplest way to trigger such stories is for an organisation's leaders - that is, leaders in the broadest sense of the word - to do remarkable things, things that other people will remark on. We saw this happen at another bank we worked with. The bank's new CEO had noticed that most of the meeting rooms in the company's headquarters were occupied all the time, but that a handful were usually empty. On closer inspection, he noticed that the empty rooms each had a sign on the door which read, "This room can only be booked by a General Manager." The CEO asked around to see if this was necessary and quickly decided it wasn't. He then personally went to each GM meeting room and tore down the notices, triggering a story that flew around the organisation.

This might seem like a small act and a trivial story. But, in fact, it fed into a much bigger narrative that the CEO was creating, which went along the lines of: "We are flattening our organisation and resources will be allocated to whoever needs them to deliver business outcomes, regardless of their level in the company."

The first step in successful story-triggering is for leaders to be mindful of their actions. Such purposefulness is easier said than done. Often a leader's intent doesn't match the lived experiences and perceptions of her colleagues. She might want to foster collaboration yet is seen as acting in ways that create competition. She will only be able to tell if she is on the right track by becoming aware of the stories that are being told about her; some story-listening might be required here.

The next step is for leaders to identify or engineer opportunities to do something remarkable, and to do it conspicuously. This might be as simple as a leader telling an authentic story that reveals something about them - in particular, something about how they really feel, rather than what they think. If this sounds wishy-washy, it isn't. In his book The Political Brain, neuroscientist and political pundit Drew Westen puts it this way, using the context of political campaigns:

"Campaigns aren't won with bags full of anything [e.g. policy promises]. They are won by candidates who can convince voters, through their words, intonation, body language, and actions, that they share their values, that they understand people like them, and that they inspire the nation or save it from danger."

One CEO we worked with punctuated each sentence of a sustainability policy he was presenting by smacking the projection screen with the back of his hand. By the end of the presentation, no-one was left in any doubt as to the fact that sustainability was important to him.

The psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey point out in their book Immunity to Change that we can also apply the idea of story-triggering at the individual level, helping people to create new stories for themselves which fulfil the prerequisites for behaviour change.

The usefulness of this approach became clear to me while I was conducting a workshop with 80 professors at an Australian university on ways to improve collaboration. As I began to make the point that two important behaviours for good collaboration were to make and keep promises and to speak your mind to colleagues with respect and good intent, I noticed a woman sitting at the back of the room. She had her arms firmly crossed and was shaking her head, clearly very unhappy with what I was saying. So I stopped my presentation and asked the woman if she would like to share what she was thinking with the rest of the group. Practically before I had finished my request, she said, "There is no way in the world you can be open and honest with a senior professor around here." Before I could comment, she went on to tell a mini story: "I once did what you are suggesting and I had to move departments."

Now, no amount of clever argument or telling of familiar stories would have changed that person's mind. She had obviously had an incredibly bad experience. The only way to help her gain a new insight would be to create an experience with a different result to what she was expecting, and to do this many times over. She would then have a new story that would in turn guide her future behaviour.

Storytelling

There are many ways to apply storytelling to your work setting. You can help your leaders to become better storytellers, and you can also begin to share stories of customer service or safety, or stories that convey your values, brand, service or product. But there is one particular type of storytelling that I'd like to focus on here, that which will help you bring your strategy to life.

As I've said in my paper, How to make your strategy stick with a strategic story [http://www.anecdote.com.au/whitepapers.php?wpid=23], the sad reality of strategies is that considerable effort is expended to create them, yet it's often the case that few people in an organisation know them. As a consequence, it is practically impossible for people to act strategically. Without the company strategy in mind, people won't know what to focus on, or what to say 'yes' or 'no' to, and they will become reliant on their managers for direction which, depending on the quality of the manager, can really curtail innovation and effectiveness. This is where strategic stories can help.

There are some misconceptions about strategic stories that we should clear up. Firstly, some people think that a strategic story is merely an immutable single story that must be conveyed unchanged in each telling. Of course, this common misunderstanding is far from the truth. One of our associates once helped a large postal service develop their strategic story, but before he'd had time to organise some sessions to explain how to use it, the story had found its way to the head of the parcels section, who promptly said there was no way he was going to parrot 'this script' or read it out to his guys. Our associate assured him that that wasn't the intention. Rather, the story had been designed to convey the meaning of the postal service's strategy via a mixture of context, emotion and facts, and with that meaning in mind, leaders would be encouraged to tell their own stories to illustrate the company's strategic directions.

A good strategic story is a framework of meaning that explains why an organisation's strategic directions have been selected. But it's also like a chord progression used by a jazz musician, in that within that progression, the musician is free improvise and adapt the music to suit their needs and the desires of the moment.

Another misconception about strategic stories is that they are crafted by the CEO and her team and communicated to everyone much like Moses heralded the Ten Commandments. On the contrary, it's important that the development of a strategic story is a participatory process that involves as many people as possible, both in its initial crafting and in the sharing of new stories about how the strategy is subsequently being lived out by employees.

Once you've developed a strategic story, you'll find that it wields tremendous power in clarifying a new strategy. Even if you already have a strategy in place, the strategic story process will often reveal misunderstandings about what the strategic directions actually mean, or disagreement among your leaders on what they should be. When we conducted separate interviews with each of the senior partners of a large consulting firm, we found them mostly in agreement about the company's strategic directions. During the strategic story process, however, we discovered major differences of opinion between them which required resolution before the process could be completed. Through some difficult but important conversations, the leaders reached agreement and now have an even stronger resolve to pursue their strategy. Unfortunately, too many organisations avoid these tough discussions or just lack the trigger and then the process to pursue them effectively. Instead, they mistakenly continue working with a completely misaligned view of their strategy.

A strategic story is memorable, adaptable and imbued with meaning. It helps everyone in an organisation to make sense of what's happening in the business. Done well, a strategic story provides a real competitive advantage.

Bringing it all together

The combination of story-listening, story-triggering and storytelling magnifies the impact of story-work far beyond that achieved through the use of a single story approach. Organisations often start with story-listening, to find out what's really happening in the workplace and to help employees work out what they need to do. Then storytelling is used to increase the ability of leaders to connect with their colleagues and inspire them. While we are all natural storytellers - I'm writing this in a cafe and the guys at the next table are sharing one story after another - we often need to build our confidence to tell stories in a work setting. This is because we've become used to merely voicing our opinions at work, rather than showing our hearts. But employees want to know what their leaders stand for, and those leaders' actions and stories are a useful guide. Once an organisation knows what is happening within it, albeit with an awareness that you can never know it all, then story-triggering is used to prompt the telling of new stories that will pave the way for a new means of acting.

If you're already applying a story technique to your organisation, then you're well placed to broaden your approach and gain the benefits of using all three story-work modes. If you're just starting out, then you have a great opportunity to distinguish yourself from your competitors by using a comprehensive story approach to improve the way you work. You'll be amazed at the business results.

I saw a TV advert recently that I believe is going to be a complete marketing failure. A campaign that is not going to make one ounce of difference in getting people to buy that product. Why? The power of social norms.

As mentioned in a previous blog post, people are highly sensitive to social norms - information about what other people are doing and what they approve of. We look for cues to how we should behave, what we should and shouldn't do, and what we should buy through looking at what other people do.

Westpac Bank recently launched a campaign using statistics of how few people had the appropriate insurance and superannuation cover to get people to buy more of these products. Here is an example of one of the adverts.

When I first saw this, my initial thought was; "Well 95% of the population don't have it, and they seem to be doing just fine. Why would I need more insurance?". I hadn't heard or read anywhere of a growing number of horror stories of families becoming destitute and homeless due to not having "adequate" insurance. It wasn't in the paper, on the TV news or being discussed by politicians.

If not having enough insurance was OK for 95% of Australians, then it was certainly OK for me.

People are highly sensitive to social norms - information about what other people are doing and what they approve of. You can use the concept of social norms to help drive and create change.

While researching the drinking habits of American college students, H. Wesley Perkins and Alan Berkowitz discovered that most students thought that the norms for both the frequency and the amount of drinking among their peers were higher than they actually were. In other words, they thought that everyone else was drinking way more than they were, which meant they ended up drinking more themselves.

The story they were telling themselves whenever excessive alcohol consumption came up was: "That's not me. Everyone is drinking way more than me." The social-norms approach aims to correct misperceptions like this.

A good example of how such a belief has been challenged comes from Georgetown University. In 2009, Georgetown launched its "You Don't Know Jack" campaign, featuring the university's beloved bulldog mascot. Posters went up that each featured a relatively unknown, fun fact about Jack, accompanied by a statistic concerning the drinking habits of 'Hoyas', the collective name for supporters of the various Georgetown University athletic teams.

Other stats included:

98% of Hoyas walk friends home to make sure they get home safe.

87% of Hoyas eat before and/or during drinking.

88% of Hoyas eat before and during drinking

Interventions such as this have helped to significantly reduce the incidence of alcohol abuse at American universities.

Other examples include

Increasing tax payments in the UK. HMRC changed letters to explain that most people in their local area had already paid their taxes. This very simple intervention boosted repayment rates by around 15 percentage points.

Reducing tobacco usage amongst youth. Schools in Montana in 2000 ran a campaign called "Most of Us Are Tobacco Free". It targeted youth between the ages of 12 and 17 years with the message that 70% of people don't smoke. Post-test data revealed that only 10% of teens in the campaign area reported first time cigarette use as compared to 17% of teens in a control sample, representing a 41% difference. This campaign was also launched in Texas to achieve the same result.

Reducing home power usage. Instead of showing you a plain power bill, OPOWER, a software company that promotes home energy efficiency, uses the one below, one that compares your energy use to that of your neighbours. Such exposure causes 60 to 80 percent of people to change their energy behaviours, the company says.

Shawn has even blogged about how they used the concept of social norms at his local basketball club to increase the payment of membershop fees..

Social norms are therefore another change strategy you have at your disposal - a very powerful one. How could you use it for your next change initiative?

Why do airlines find it so hard to say sorry?

I have been doing a lot of travel lately, and today is no exception, with flying from my home in Melbourne to Brisbane to run a session on teaching leaders in an IT department to tell their strategic story.

Last night in Melbourne was pretty rough weather wise - massive downpours (the wettest September day in 56 years), lightening and thunder. This obviously caused significant travel disruption, with Melbourne airport being severely impacted with a number of postponed and cancelled flights. This meant that a large number of planes, and crew, were not in the right place for their departures this morning.

So for me, this meant a delay of 2 hours to my flight this morning. This has meant I have had to contact my client and move the session back, and for a number of the attendees this has meant that can only come to the first hour of the session. You don't want to incur extra costs by staying the night before, and I thought that by getting a flight which gave me an extra 2 1/2 hours of 'contingency' I would be fine. It was very stressful when this was not the case.

So when we finally get onboard the flight this morning, the announcement welcoming us started off quite well with the cabin crew member explaining the reasons for the delay (see my blog post on the importance of this). It then quickly went downhill.

Comments like; "so you should all feel lucky we are only two hours late", and "I am sure this short delay will not impact anyone", didn't lighten my mood.

However the thing that got me the most - not once did he apologise. The word "sorry" did not cross his lips. Even an insincere, 'you can tell he didn't mean it' kind of apology. Nothing.

I just don't understand why, on two counts. Why did he not say it, and why does it bother me so much?

I know it's not his fault. I know the reasons for the delay. But there is something about the acknowledgement of the impact on me and my day that needed to be said, whether he meant it or not.

This is not a solely Australian airline behaviour. After flying on the 6:20 a.m. London Gatwick to Edinburgh flight every week for nearly two years, and it being delayed more often than on time, not once did I hear an apology. Maybe it's just an airline thing?

I would love to hear people's views on those two questions I posed for myself: Why do airlines not say sorry?, and why does it seem to matter to me so much?

I might have to do some research myself on the power that comes from an apology. I am flying to Newcastle tomorrow morning, I might very well have some time on my hands...

I was reminded, yet again, last week about the power that comes from overtly answering the "why?" question.

I was working on a client site when I saw this poster stuck on an external door:

The explanation below the main text makes this poster far stronger as an influence tool and more likely to stop people smoking directly outside the door. Why? It gives a reason not to smoke in that place.

The power of giving a reason was highlighted in research by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer as far back as 1978. She undertook a very simple experiment with students queuing up to use a library photocopier.

When students were asked; "Excuse me, I have five pages, may I use the machine?" 60% agreed to the request; 40%, however, said no and continued with their own copying.

When a reason was added; "Excuse me, I have five pages, may I use the photocopier, I'm in a rush" - 94% percent agreed to the request.

This makes sense.

However, what doesn't make sense is why the same number agreed when the request was changed to "Excuse me, may I use the photcopier because I want to make copies." This reasoning doesn't really make sense. Why would you use a photocopier if you were not planning to make copies? It is the same as no reason at all.

Langer therefore concluded that the key difference to whether the majority of people would agree to a request or not, was if a reason was attached to the request. If people at least tried to address the "why?" question.

Now I believe that any reason is fine, even it doesn't make sense, when you are asking a stranger for a one off favour. But when it comes to influencing behaviour on an ongoing basis in our homes and workplaces, the reason itself also becomes important.

There are a number of ways I think this poster works in getting across the reason not to smoke outside the door. It:

• makes the consequences of smoking in that location very concrete
• has narrative elements (although not fully a story)
• encourages empathy on the part of the viewer in order to gain compliance

Dan Pink has a whole section on his website about posters like this, which he calls emotionally intelligent signage that is well worth checking out.

For such a simple poster, it really does a great job of answering the "why?" question and positively impacting behaviour.

“A company without a story is usually a company without a strategy.”
Ben Horowitz, entrepreneur and investor¹

Steve Jobs bounces onto the stage and grabs the slide changer from his colleague with a friendly “Thanks Scott”. He’s looking thin and grey, illness having taken its toll, but his energy remains boundless. It’s the 2011 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference and Steve is about to announce a change in strategy for his company. The 1000-plus crowd cheers as he steps into the spotlight and then falls silent, hanging on his next utterance.

“About 10 years ago we had one of our most important insights, and that was the PC was gonna become the digital hub for your digital life.” With these words, Steve begins his strategic story.

A recent global study of 450 enterprises found that 80% of those companies felt their people did not understand their strategies very well.² It’s the dirty little secret shared by so many companies: ask any employee about your strategy, including the executive team, and they’ll lunge for a document that tells them. It’s rarely embedded in their minds and, as a result, the espoused strategy does not influence day-to-day decision-making. Given the effort applied to strategy development, there is a massive disconnect here. The opportunity to reconnect a firm with its strategy lies in how this strategy is communicated and understood.

There are a number of ways of conveying your organisation’s strategy. A popular approach is to craft a beautiful-looking PowerPoint presentation and email it to all your team leaders, with instructions to present it to their teams. The head of strategy for one Australia’s iconic brands once told me he happened to sit in on one of these talks and witnessed a team leader presenting a slide pack. It went something like this: “OK, HQ has asked me to tell you about (clicks to the first slide) … ah yes, our strategy. (clicks to the next slide and reads out the contents, then clicks again, pauses, and says:) Not sure what this means …” (clicks to the next slide). The audience slid into boredom. The talk failed to engage the team and left them none the wiser about the strategy and why the company was taking that approach. In fact, they were probably more cynical about and disengaged from the company than they had been before they’d sat down.

So sure, emailing a slide pack is easy, but in most cases it’s next to useless. It often achieves the opposite of what you want.

Another popular method is the CEO roadshow. The CEO visits each company site and presents the slide pack herself. This act is symbolic. It shows that the CEO really cares about the strategy and wants everyone to know about it, so it must be important. The audience watches intently to see how she presents the strategy, to see if she really believes it, if she really cares about it. Of course, the CEO is also there to answer questions, but no-one dares ask one in such an open forum.

Sadly, the result is often similar to what was observed by the head of strategy mentioned earlier. In kicking off a strategy session, a department head at a well-known bank asked a roomful of people, “So, who can tell me about our strategy?” Nothing. “OK, just one of the 12 items then.&rldquo; Still nothing. “So, no-one can remember any of the 12 things I have just travelled around all our sites talking about?” Silence.

Slide pack-driven presentations typically contain lots of bullet points and graphs and facts, but because these are not presented within an overarching narrative, it’s hard for the audience to join the dots. The audience forgets the information almost as soon as it files out of the auditorium because the presentation lacks a memorable story.

A key question people often ask when they hear about a new strategy is “Why?” “Why are we focusing on acquisition?” “Why are we outsourcing?” “Why are we demoting the Mac to the level of an iPhone or iPad?” A story best answers these “Why?” questions because it tells us what caused the change and what’s going to happen next – the strategy. A story provides the context for a strategy, making it meaningful and allowing it to connect with other company stories employees may have in their minds.

Here’s an example of a strategic story that was told to me at an executive story training session for a telecommunications company in Malaysia. The organisation’s leader was listening to my explanation of a strategic story when he suddenly jumped up and said: “I get it. Here’s our story. Over the last 10 years we’ve been focused on building mobile coverage. Our revenues have steadily increased but our infrastructure costs are rising faster. In 2 years time our infrastructure costs will exceed revenue. That’s why we’re now moving to collaborate and share infrastructure with our competitors and putting our efforts into competing on what runs on our mobile network.”

Why was this company collaborating with their competitors on infrastructure? Because its infrastructure costs were going through the roof. A simple yet effective story helped us understand why.

Strategic stories are powerful because people can picture them, remember them and retell them. Well-developed stories not only answer the “Why?” questions but also convey emotion in a way that inspires people to take action in accordance with the new strategy.

Developing an effective strategic story requires some work, primarily by the members of the executive team, who will often have a variety of views about what the company strategy actually is. It’s crucial that the responsibility for the story is not outsourced to the strategy department or, even worse, given to a creative agency. The leaders of the company must firstly clarify their own understandings of the strategy. They must then own both the strategy and the story that communicates it. Finally, they must not merely be comfortable telling that story – they must relish doing so.

One of the challenges faced by executives is to overcome the desire to get the words of the story absolutely perfect, as if the next Pulitzer Prize winner is being written. The story should instead be written to suit oral retellings, where the spine of the story will remain unchanged but the exact wording will be chosen by the speaker. These choices will be guided by the context and purpose of the story telling. Sometimes the telling will be long, sometimes it will be short, or it will focus on one part of the business, or on an internal story, or an external one … Stories have a tremendous capacity for adaptation.

Another challenge faced by executives is the desire to only talk about what’s working well. The problem with that, however, is that a pollyanna story – where everything is good and nothing ever goes wrong – is never believed for long, if at all. Eventually, everyone will see it as merely corporate spin. Steve Jobs does not make this mistake at the developers conference. Part-way through his telling of the strategic story that introduces iCloud, he admits the failings of the now superseded software MobileMe, saying, “It wasn’t our finest hour.”³ The crowd roars with laughter. There is a sense of relief that he hasn’t tried to sweep the failure under the carpet. His strategic story gains credibility.

One of the simplest ways of working out what failings to include in your strategic story is to explore the possible anti-tales that might be told to discredit your story. A key lesson in story work is that you can’t beat a good story with fact; you can only beat a good story with a better story. A strong example of this was provided by a large government department that we helped to develop a strategic story. This department had just merged with another department and their strategic story highlighted the advantages of the integration. When we asked the executives to tell us some anti-stories, they described how the department had attempted another merger a decade ago but it had only lasted a couple of years. They called it the big divorce, and there were still fears that it might happen again. It was clear we needed to face up to that fact in the department’s strategic story.

Once an executive team can tell their strategic story, replete with personal anecdotes that really bring the story to life, they then need to get the rest of their organisation involved in telling it. It’s important to achieve this through both bottom-up and top-down approaches, and to allow for variations of the story to emerge that suit different parts of the business while maintaining the story’s core.

Large company gatherings are a perfect time to introduce a strategic story. Immersing many people in a story at the same time results in an aspect of group psychology called ‘social proof’ – the social pressure that tells us that if other people are doing something, it is safe for us to do the same thing. A large event provides the perfect forum for executives to present their story and for the participants to share their own anecdotes, which can reinforce and illustrate the strategy. This also allows concerns and anecdotes which contradict or undermine the strategic story to surface and be dealt with.

Companies can develop and embed strategic stories at any level of the organisation. There can be a company-wide strategic story or one for a particular business division. CIOs are beginning to invest in developing strategic stories to bring their IT strategies to life so it makes sense for CEOs, other executives and board members.

An organisation’s culture is defined by the stories employees, customers, partners and all the many stakeholders tell. So if you want to change your company’s culture, you must therefore change the stories people tell. Your strategic story will become entwined in your culture, providing an overarching narrative that triggers new stories while also being modified by what happens in the organisation. The strategic story is alive because it is not merely the words that the executive team assemble and speak. Rather, the strategic story is fed by the multitudinous actions people take in the organisation.

Edgar Schein noted nearly a decade ago that there are relatively few things leaders do that inordinately affect organisational culture:⁴

• what leaders pay attention to, measure and control on a regular basis
• how leaders react to critical incidents and organisational crises
• how leaders allocate resources
• deliberate role modelling, teaching and coaching
• how leaders allocate rewards and status
• how leaders recruit, select, promote and excommunicate.

Each of these actions will trigger stories. Leaders must be mindful that their actions are more important in sustaining a strategic story than anything they say, because when people have a choice between believing a stated strategic story or the actions of their leaders, they will always take more notice of what the leaders do. The message for leaders, then, is that they should align their decisions and behaviours with their company strategy and the strategic story that describes it, or they will see their strategic efforts fail. Strategy implementation is change management.

It’s clear that creating an effective strategic story, one with real impact, involves much more than simply crafting and then telling a compelling story. It involves an executive team developing the strategic story themselves so that they can own it. It involves that team being comfortable with telling the story and weaving their own experiences through it. And most importantly, it involves everyone in the organisation learning and telling their own versions of the strategic story so that they all own it and act to support and build on it.

Steve Jobs paces back and forth across the stage, painting word pictures of where Apple has come from, why a change in strategy is needed, and where the company will now be heading. He talks as if it has already come to pass. Eventually he brings up his last slide, takes a deep breath, and finishes his story: “So that is iCloud.”

References

1. Horowitz, B. 2010, How Andreessen Horowitz Evaluates CEOs, http://www.businessinsider.com/how-andreessen-horowitz-evaluates-ceos-2010-5-2.
2. Vanson Bourne (2011). The link between strategic alignment and staff productivity: A survey of decision-makers in enterprise organisations. http://www.successfactors.co.uk/resources/resource-item/the-link-between-strategic-alignment-and-staff-productivity/
3. Apple WWDC 2011 Keynote Address. http://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/apple-wwdc-2011-keynote-address/id275834665?i=94705755
4. Schein, E.H. (2004). Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd edn, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco.

"If, when you think of one, you get a sharp intake of breath and start to feel a steely resolve inside to follow through, it's probably the right one".

What was my friend Toby talking about that would have such an impact on me?  The answer - an Anti-charity.

The concept of the Anti-charity comes from stickK a website started in 2007 by two Yale University professors, Dean Karlan and Ian Ayres.

During graduate school at M.I.T., Karlan and a colleague, John Romalis, made a wager to lose 40 pounds each and to referee one another so as to stay on target.  They created a contract to do this, and both signed up.  They also promised to pay each other $10,000 if they didn't lose the weight by an agreed date.   If they both both failed, the one who failed by least would get $5,000.

They were using the concept found in behavioural economics called loss aversion.  Loss aversion refers to people's tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains.  It implies that someone who loses $100 will lose more satisfaction than another person will gain satisfaction from a $100 windfall.  Some studies suggest that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains. (*1)

Happily, both Karlin and Romalis succeeded in shedding the pounds and in 2007 Karlin and some other colleagues launched stickK, a website based on this contractual approach to achieving tough personal goals.

Users set up a "commitment contract" where they agree to achieve a certain goal, such as losing weight, exercising more, quitting smoking, or conserving energy.  As part of the typical contract, an independent referee must be appointed to monitor whether the goal has been reached and to inform stickK.

And if the contract is broken?

When setting up the contract you can commit a certain amount of money to be forfeited if you don't complete a task (i.e. $5 every time you didn't go the gym when you committed too).  The money could go to a friend, a charity you choose, or the one that really got me interested was the money would go to an Anti-charity.

An Anti-charity is any organisation whose views you strongly oppose, or one which promotes values that are most contrary to your own.  As they say on the website;

"The purpose of an Anti-charity is to provide an added incentive for you to achieve your goal. By designating an Anti-charity as your recipient of stakes, you'll certainly work that much harder to ensure that your money never falls into the wrong hands."

So for example is you were:

• a very happy smoker who was worried about the number of challenges of your right to smoke, the money could go to say the Non Smokers; Movement of Australia who are, according to their website, there; "Protecting the rights of the Non-smoking majority from tobacco smoke and from the tobacco industry's propaganda".
• a practising Christian the money could go to the Atheist Foundation of Australia (or vice versa)
• someone who was working to reduce the effects of climate change and educate others to do the same, your forfeited money could go to the US organisation 'The Stop Climate Chaos Coalition'
• a proud gun owner who believed in your right to keep and bear arms your Anti-charity could be the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence
• a sports fan, and the money would go to your arch enemies supporters club (i.e. a supporter of Carlton footie club here in Melbourne and the money going to Collingwood, or to the NSW State of Origin fund if you were from Queensland, or to Celtic Football Club if you supported Glasgow Rangers).

When we first started using stickK, Toby and I decided to test a few things out.  His challenge was to cook himself a home cooked meal every night for three months.  Not that easy for an early 20s, single bloke, living alone, surrounded by takeaways.  For me it was about exercise and undertaking some form of it three times a week.

We started off setting up any forfeits we incurred to go to a charity.  However what we quickly found was that it had no impact on whether we did the task or not.  What was the worse outcome if I didn't exercise, $5 would go to World Vision?  Didn't feel like much of a punishment.

We therefore changed it to for the money to go to our Anti-Charity and that is where the conversation that started this blog came from.  When, as an Arsenal football (soccer) fan, Toby said the $5 could go the the Tottenham Hotspurs (Spurs) Supporters club (our arch enemies), I had the exact reaction he mentioned - a sharp intake of breath and start to feel a steely resolve inside to follow through.

Our natural desire to avoid loss, coupled with the concept of the Anti-charity really resonated with me and did play a part in me exercising far more regularly.  The thought of paying out to a bunch of Spurs fans if I didn't meet my commitments to exercise, had me reaching for the phone to make that squash court booking right then and there!

 

(*1) Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk. Econometrica 47, 263-291.

 

I want to expand a little on Mark's post and on the communication structure we're proposing. I hope you don't mind, but let me start with how the idea emerged.

My first real job back in the 1980s was to work for Oracle Systems, the database company. One day my manager asked me to give a presentation to a group of customers who were coming in that afternoon. I went into the boardroom, sat up my slideshow and then realised I had no idea on how to give a presentation. I called my manager in and confessed by ignorance and he gave me a crash course. At the end of his instruction he suggested I join a Toastmasters club, which I did.

At Toastmasters a meeting often starts by the chair asking someone to give a little 3-minute impromptu talk on just about any topic the chair nominates. You have no time to prepare, you just have to talk. Thankfully Toastmasters provides some strategies to structure your response and one that I remember was called PREP: Point, Reason, Example, Point.

Wind forward to the 21st century. After working with stories for some time now we've learned that telling a story before giving a rational argument can be effective in helping your audience to really hear what you're saying and perhaps even influence them in a new way of thinking. We came to this view after learning about the confirmation bias which tells us that if someone has a strong opinion, and your offer an alternative opinion, your attempt only serves to reinforce their strong opinion. Telling someone a story first, however, seems to loosen them up to hear your argument. We think this has something to do with the fact that stories provide a pull approach (the listener pulls the story to them) rather than a push approach (the teller pushes the information at the listeners).

So rather than Point, Reason, Example, Point (PREP) we are suggesting you should rearrange your responses to be Point, Example, Reason, Point (PERP); a small but significant change. And of course your example should be a story. And if you are uncetain what we mean by a story, please check out the story test.

This change to PERP will require us to change the way we present in organsations. The common approach goes something like this:

"Welcome everyone.

20 slides with lots of opinions, research, and clever argument.

"Now I would like to show you some examples." Well, you've already kicked off the confirmation bias and if they felt strongly against the idea they are just digging in their heels.

How about:

"Welcome everyone. I would like to share a couple of examples that go to the heart of what we are facing and where we need to get to."

You tell a couple of excellent stories

Now you make your argument.

Is really listening to someone about your listening abilities, or is it about your motivation to listen? Is it about the 'skills' of listening or is it the desire to want to listen that makes the difference?

I have been running a series of workshops lately where we do a very simple listening exercise that gets the participants to actually feel what it is like not to be listened too. The exercise takes it from being a purely rational/logical thing (i.e. "I know that not being listened too isn't nice") to one where they actually feel the anger, frustration and almost diminishing sense of self worth that comes when you are not being listened too.

At the end of the exercise I do a de-brief and one of the questions I ask is; "What do you think is more important when you listen - your ability to listen, or your desire to listen?" You can see people have this light bulb moment as they realise it is not the ability side of listening that they are struggling with, it's the motivation to want to listen in the first place.

When asked they can all tell you what you need to do to be able to listen better, from a skills perspective - mirror body language, lean forward, make eye contact, avoid distractions etc. etc. A good outline of some of these were covered in a blog Shawn did in May last year.

However, these things only become useful if you want to listen in the first place.

For me listening, really listening to someone, is an issue of motivation first and foremost. Once I want to listen to you, then my skills and abilities to listen can really kick in.

Some people collect stamps, knit or spend hours planning their next exotic holiday - I collect articles and books on behaviour change! I admit it, I'm a geek when it comes to trying to understand why we do what we do, and how you can go about changing it.

I'm not too proud to say: "Hi, my name's Kevin and I am addicted to understanding how to change behaviour".

One of the most fascinating areas I have been looking at lately is the impact scents have on our behaviour.

Retailers have long recognised the positive effects that smells can have on people's buying behaviours. Supermarkets lure shoppers with wafts of baking bread and we have all heard stories of Real Estate agents telling people to freshly brew coffee when having an open home. Other businesses are signing on too, some choosing scents that carry apt connotations for particular products they want to sell, a technique called billboarding.

Bloomingdale's, for instance, billboards the smell of baby powder in its infant-clothing department, while hints of lilac waft around the department store's intimate-apparel displays. American upscale ice cream chain Emack & Bolio's recently adopted a waffle-cone smell to attract patrons to the scoop shop within their Hard Rock Hotel branch, where sales had been flagging. The effect? Ice cream sales shot up more than a third.

Now the office world, too, is seeking its own unique aroma to lift employees' spirits and even reduce mistakes.

A recent study in a financial services company concluded that staff made 40% fewer errors when surrounded by the smell of cinnamon. Another employer used lavender to soothe the stressed-out staff at a frenetic call centre.

Despite the Big Brother connotations of squirting mood-enhancing smells into the workplace via air cooling systems or stand-alone "fragrance delivery" machines, the use of aromas to get up the noses of employees is on the increase.

Signature Aromas currently supplies more than 40 different natural, oil-based fragrances . "Japanese employers routinely use their air-conditioning systems to disperse 'wake-up' fragrances such as citrus early in the morning, floral notes to boost concentration when the late morning hubbub is at its height and woody scents like cedar or cypress to relieve tiredness in the afternoon," says Brian Chappell, the director of Signature Aromas.

C Interactive, a client of Scent Technologies, had initial reservations when it decided to introduce citrus smells into its sales office to boost alertness.  "We didn't really expect anything much to happen and started off surreptitiously, with an aroma box that looked like an air vent, because we weren't sure of the staff would like the idea," says Daniel Graham. However the effects were so dramatic that the company explained to its sales staff their new enthusiasm for work. "Since introducing aroma machines into the office, our turnover has increased by 10%, absenteeism is down and we have a far more energised sales force," says Graham.

The idea of having scents pumped through the air conditioning system at work, either with or without my knowledge, is one that doesn't appeal to me in the least. You can not avoid it, you don't have a choice whether to breath it in or not, and feels way too 'Big Brother' for me.

Smell can also have an impact on our ethics.

Chen-Bo Zhong, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, conducted a series of small experiments designed to test how changes in an environment -- differences in smell -- can affect human behaviour. Participants were randomly assigned to rooms, some sprayed with citrus-scented window cleaner. In some of the experiments, the participants played a game of trust with an anonymous partner involving money. The way the game typically works is that one partner is given a sum of money and told to put some or all of the money in an envelope. He is told his anonymous partner will receive triple that amount and will give some of the money back. Of course, the second partner could just keep all the money.

In Zhong's experiment, the participants played the role of the second partner and were all told their partner had given them the full mount, $4, which was then tripled to $12. The participants were free to anonymously return some or none of the money.

"What we found was that in the citrus-scented room, people were more likely to engage in good behaviours," Zhong said. "They were more likely to honour the trust that other people displayed."

He went on to say; "Based on the experiments we have conducted and the findings we've found, I think it's reasonable to speculate that people in a real environment, where they can smell these scents that are associated with purity and cleanliness, also may tend to be behave more ethically or socially."

Have you ever realised the impact that smell has on our behaviour? Have you ever considered using different scents in your working environment, or do you actually do it? I would love to hear any real world examples out there.

We have been using narrative approaches for many years to help organisations with employee engagement. This 4 minute youtube video gives some insights into some of the things we've notice working in this field and some examples of behaviours that can build or undermine engagement. In 2009, we also posted a detailed description of how narrative can be applied to this challenge.

Research has shown that willpower is like a muscle – the more you train it, the more powerful it becomes.

In a study published last year, Dr. Mark Muraven at the University of Albany had a subset of participants spend two weeks practising acts of self-control. these were things like resisting eating unhealthy food. These participants subsequently excelled at tests of self-control compared with their own baseline performance. By contrast, no such improvement was observed among control participants who merely spent the same time completing maths problems, a task which, although boring and challenging, doesn’t depend on the ability to resist impulses.

I realised this concept of "building your willpower muscle" underpins the latest campaign here on Australian TV about stopping smoking called "Never Give Up Giving Up".

People will only change their behaviour if they feel it’s worth it (motivation) and they know they can do it (ability). Studies like this are really showing that will power is not something we are born with, but something we can develop, i.e. an ability we can learn.

This ability to develop and practise skills around willpower is therefore a key elements in helping people develop the ability to create real, meaningful and sustainable change. For any ex-smokers like myself out there, I am sure you have all got your own stories about how you failed a few times to give up before you finally succeeded. We now know this was just us building our willpower muscle!

Did you ever think the good old movie training montage, found in such classic's as The Karate Kid, Team America, or the Rocky movies, could beautifully sum up all the elements of deliberate practice?

I have been doing some work over the last few weeks on developing a 'Deliberate Practice Program' that will help to make learning stick even more for participants in our programs such as Storytelling for Business Leaders.   

As my mind was very much tuned into the whole area of 'practice', I watched a scene from The Kings Speech last week with added interest. The scene was a montage where Lionel Logue (played by Geoffrey Rush) and Bertie (Colin Firth) were undertaking a series of exercises and drills to help the future King overcome his speech impediment. What I realised is that I was actually watching all the elements of deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice is a concept outlined by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, who is is widely recognised as the world's leading researcher on expertise. He has studied how people become experts in a whole range of fields, and looked for the consistent attributes of what they do to make them achieve these superior levels of performance. The consistent feature they have identified is not some natural born talent, or the hours they practice, but how they practice - specifically how they undertake deliberate practice.

The key attributes of deliberate practice are:

• Repetition - Performing the task occurs repetitively rather than at its naturally occurring frequency
• Focused feedback: - Task performance is evaluated by a coach during performance
• Breaking the task down into its parts and practicing these individually and then as a whole
• Immediacy of performance - After corrective feedback on task performance there is an immediate repetition so that the task can be performed more in accordance with what is required/expected
• Stop and start- because of the repetition and feedback, deliberate practice is typically seen as a series of short performances
• Active coaching - Typically a coach must be very active during deliberate practice, monitoring performance, assessing adequacy, and controlling the structure of training
• Emphasis on difficult aspects - Deliberate practice will focus on more difficult aspects, for example, when flying an airplane normally only a small percentage of the flight time is taken up by takeoffs and landings. In deliberate practice simulators, however, a large portion of the time will be involved in landings and takeoffs
• Focus on areas of weakness - in real life situations people are striving to achieve the task and therefore are unlikely to do the things they see as a weakness or they think will stop them achieving. Deliberate practice therefore allows time and space to practise these elements
• Work vs. play - deliberate practice feels more like work and is more effortful than casual performance

Now, watch the following clip from the movie 'Cool Runnings' and tell me how many of these elements exist?

When we collect stories in companies one of the most common anecdotes is the one about the boss who fails to recognise their staff's work. People want to be thanked, appreciated, recognised regardless of their level in the organisation or their level of skill or expertise.

Dan Ariely conducted a simple experiment described in his latest book, The Upside of Irrationality, which shows that a simple nod of appreciation is more than a nicety, it's a business necessity.

This is how it worked. Imagine a room where you might have a university exam--hopefully this doesn't send chills down your spine. Sitting up front is the invigilator keeping an eye on your every move and ready to collect your paper at the end. In this case each person collects a single sheet of paper from the invigilator that's covered in words. Your task is to circle any two letters that sit side-by-side and are the same. When you finish one page you return it to the invigilator and get another sheet until you can't be bothered doing it any more.

There are three groups in this experiment.

For the first group when they return their sheet the invigilator gives a friendly smile and a nod of thanks.

People in the second group returning their paper are ignored. The invigilator doesn't even look up. Their sheet is turned faced down onto a pile and without a word a new sheet is given.

The invigilator for the third group takes the sheet and without looking at the contents shreds it in front of the participant before handing them another sheet of paper to work on.

On avergae the first group that gets the nod of appreciation complete 9.03 sheets. Not bad for such a boring task.

The third group are ritually humiliated by the invigilator by shedding their work complete on average 6.34 sheets.

So what do you think happened for those people who were ignored? Are they somewhere in between groups 1 and 3?

Group three who received no feedback completed on average 6.77 sheets, very similar to those people who were practically abused as their efforts were destroyed before their eyes.

It would seem that authentic appreciation for a job well done goes along way to boost productivity and if you are one of these bosses who figures, "hey, they're smart people who know what to do. They don't need my praise." think again. You could be really holding them back.

I have just finished The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems by Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin) a book I have been waiting for some time to come out. I am very glad to say the wait has been well worth it.

Positive deviance has received a lot of attention since the concept was laid out in a series of articles way back in 2000 – one in the Harvard Business Review and the other in Fast Company. The concept has recently received a new boost since it was covered in both Influencer: the Power to Change Anything and by Chip and Dan Heath (where they called them ‘bright spots’) in Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.

Positive deviance is based on the observation that in every community or organisation, there are certain individuals or groups (the ‘positive deviants’ or ‘bright spots’), whose uncommon but successful behaviours enable them to find better solutions to a problem than their peers. Positive deviance identifies these individuals or groups, who have access to exactly the same resources and face the same challenges and obstacles as their peers, and examines their behaviours and attitudes, which help them avoid problems that plague the rest of their community.

The concept of positive deviance is therefore relatively simple. It involves the identification of people who manage to thrive in a situation where most fail; figuring out what those people are doing that is different from the majority; and then getting everyone to engage in the same actions, thereby solving the problem. Sounds simple enough right? The book shows the challenges encountered in trying to use positive deviance to make a difference to a wide range of seemingly intractable problems.

The book is based around six in-depth case studies (a chapter each) on the use of positive deviance to address childhood malnutrition in Vietnam, stopping female circumcision in Egypt, reducing hospital infection rates in the US, reducing infant mortality in Pakistan, boosting sales within the pharmaceutical firm Merck, and helping reintegrate girl soldiers in Uganda.

Each of these chapters is an in-depth analysis of the power and limitations of positive deviance and how they have learnt and adapted the approach as they have gone along. These case studies really bring to life the context, situation and challenges they faced in each scenario. They are detailed, have a lot of information in them, and I've gone back and re-read most of them a number of times, and each time something new has jumped off the page for me.

Some of the key lessons I've taken, or had reinforced, from these case studies include:

1. We focus too much on the ‘what’, and not enough on the ‘how’.

We are drawn to the 'technical' stuff – the 'what', the specific practices and tools that make the individual positive deviants successful;

“That's the easy part – and only 20 percent of the work. What matters far more is the 'how' – the very particular journey that each community must engage in to mobilize itself, …discover its latent wisdom, and put this wisdom into practice.” This point really made me think about the number of articles I have articles about positive deviance, and how the vast majority of them focused on the ‘what’ the solution – not on the ‘how’ the solution was found and integrated into a community – from my experience the hard stuff.

2. The danger we bring as ‘experts’ in the change process:

As the authors say: “The greatest barrier to the success of positive deviance approach comes not from the members of the community themselves but from the “experts” who seek to help them...” There is fantastic story of how a suggestion around the use of tongs for Fried Chicken fundamentally changed an expert’s view on how to deal with, and beat, MRSA

3. Creating compelling and concrete portrayals of the problem at hand.

I absolutely love the story of using chocolate pudding to bring to life MRSA and its impacts in the VA Hospital in Pittsburgh

4. Change starts with changing practices

The conventional wisdom is that knowledge changes attitudes and attitudes change practice. Positive deviance reverses that. It starts with changing practice. As people see that changes make a difference, their attitude changes and they internalise the knowledge.

As the authors say; “its easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than to think your way into a new way of acting… Once positive deviance behaviours have been discovered, the design must provide those who seek to learn with both the opportunity and the means to practice the new behaviour. A focus on practice rather than knowledge has proven to be a key element in bringing about lasting behavioural change...”

5. Use Deliberate Practice to practice the new behaviour

There is a lovely sidebar headed ‘choreographed conversations’ about training positive deviance participants in Egypt to start conversations around female circumcision. It is a great example of some of the key elements of deliberate practice.

6. Positive deviance is not the same as ‘Best Practice’

What comes out of the positive deviance process should not be confused with ‘best practices’ that we all are familiar with in our organisations. ‘Best Practices’ are typically identified by those at the top and then presented to everyone else for adoption. Positive deviance, on the other hand, is based on discovery by the practitioners themselves, which promotes buy in, acceptance, and change.

The book finishes with some absolute nuggets in how to undertake positive deviance work in a section called the ‘Basic Field Guide to Positive Deviance’. It provides a step by step guide (as much as you can within a process as fluid as that of positive deviance) on the key activities within a positive deviance initiative, as well as some really practical tips they have picked up during all of their work. My favourite one is; “Let silence speak! (Pause for twenty seconds after asking a question. That’s long enough to sing happy birthday!). Try it, you’ll be amazed how long twenty seconds actually is!

Overall, I have thoroughly enjoyed The Power of Positive Deviance (http://tinyurl.com/2vykgaz). It is detailed, it’s in-depth, and provides a huge amount of information about positive deviance and the challenges to apply it to solve real world problems. It did take some effort in parts to relate the chapters back to my world. Not always easy to link stopping female circumcision in Egypt with and the challenges that I face in creating change within organizations, but the links and the lessons are there.

Lastly, a word of advice. If you want to easily understand the concepts and principles of positive deviance and get excited about it and how it has been used – start with Influencer (http://tinyurl.com/yuvg54) and Switch (http://tinyurl.com/37bnsoz). If you need to get senior stakeholders and sponsors excited about the concept, do the same. If you then want to try and use positive deviance in making a difference to the challenges you face, read The Power of Positive Deviance (http://tinyurl.com/2vykgaz).


About the authors:

Richard Pascale is an academic at Oxford University, and author of numerous books including Surfing the Edge of Chaos (http://tinyurl.com/334ceb3). Jerry Sternin was the world's leading expert in the application of positive deviance before his death in December, 2008. Monique Sternin has been an equal partner in these efforts and now heads the Positive Deviance Institute (http://tinyurl.com/kmqjb9) at Tufts University.

In our work to help organisations make their strategies stick we often start by helping the executives get clear on their purpose. Why does their enterprise exist? If you have facilitated these types of sessions you probably seen this happen a million times: the group circles in on the essence of what's important and then suddenly they get bogged down nit picking words and trying to incorporate every possibility. In large organisation each executive wants to ensure their part of the business is included in the purpose statement and if you let this happen you end up with mush.

Here's what I do which makes a big difference. Just when they start to get bogged down I call a time out and ask them to watch this video.

From that point on everyone refers back to the Dan's messages and pull each other up when they start acting like a 10th grade school teacher and we move along at pace.

Here is an example of a purpose statement we helped deliver from the Transport Accident Commission: "A future where every journey is a safe one."

It's interesting to note that Dan uses a story to get his message across and clever use of animated graphics.

Earth Hour has been held annually since 2007, in late March. In that first year, Earth Hour focussed on getting one city, Sydney, to switch off its lights for 60 minutes. In 2010, over 1 billion people participated in 128 countries and over 4000 cities. Where did this global phenomenon originate? What forces were arrayed to make it happen?

I hadn't thought much about those questions until last night, when Shawn and I were at a conference dinner and heard Todd Sampson (of the Gruen Transfer fame...oh yeah, he has also climbed Mt Everest solo) talk about creativity. Todd described how, in 2006, he met with five other people in the Hilton hotel in Sydney. The group wanted to tackle a big question: how do you change people's behaviour for the benefit of the planet without using fear? The answer they came up with… Earth Hour. The World Wildlife Fund got behind the initiative, people's imaginations were ignited and the rest is history.

We are always on the lookout for little things that make a big difference. Earth Hour shows us that we can switch off our lights. Time to start making some beeswax candles in preparation for the next Earth Hour which will be held at 8.30pm 26 March 2011.

Last night I started reading Immunity to Change by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey. I highlighted a phrase in the introduction that really stood out for me. This morning I was looking through my notebook and came across notes from a conversation I had with Shawn on 19 March this year after he had read the same book. The note contained the same phrase I had highlighted last night. I wanted to share this piece of serendipity with you.

The paragraph in question was about the leaders they had worked with who were successful in implementing real and lasting change and the point noted by both Shawn and I was:

...all [these leaders] shared on thing in common...a deep and abiding recognition that their people bring their humanity to work with them every single day; that the absolute division between the work realm and the personal realm is naive and unhelpful; and that 21st Century leaders must find a more effective way to engage the emotional lives of their organisations and their leadership teams.

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

Just in case you haven't seen this animation it's worth the 10 minutes to learn about Dan Pink's findings on what really motivates us.

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.

We have been keeping in touch with Kevin Bishop in the UK since running our Influencing Change workshops earlier in the year. A useful idea when trying to achieve change is to make the invisible visible. Kevin has just sent us an excellent example of this.

One of the main issues in the United Kingdom election campaign has been around the economy and how to reduce the huge Government budget deficit. The recession has left a record £163.4bn (AUD$269.2bn) hole in the UK Government's finances in the last financial year, as tax receipts dried up and public spending kept rising. This has meant that Britain's national debt is now an eye-watering £950bn (AUD$1.565 trillion).

These are huge numbers to try and comprehend. What is the actual difference between a million, a billion and a trillion, and how do you make this somehow real for people (including me!)?

This explanation really helped me come to terms with these huge numbers, in a format I could understand. It says:

• 1 million seconds is equal to 11 ½ days
• 1 billion seconds is equal to 31 ¾ years
• 1 trillion seconds is equal to 31,710 years

So the difference between a million and a billion is the difference between 11 ½ days and 31 ¾ years (11.5 days vs. 11,315 days)!

All figures were taken from this article.

Yesterday I ran a workshop for a group of executives on how to find bright spots in your organisation (groups of people who excel with the same resources as everyone else) and then work out ways to transfer the behaviour evident in these bright spots to other parts of their business. I tried to help them feel what this is like to transfer these bright spot behaviours by telling some stories. I think I was moderately successful. It was clear to me that many participants favoured the analyse-think-change approach while I was advocating see-feel-change (Kotter and Cohen make this distinction in The Heart of Change).

I wish I had some videos like these ones that really help you feel it. In this case they have a road safety message. In both cases they trigger a future story for us increasing the chance we will modify our behaviour. Which one of these two videos had the biggest impact for you?

Thanks to the Nudge blog for pointers to the videos.

This post is by our guest blogger, Kevin Bishop, who recently was in Australia and ran a series of workshops with Anecdote on Influencing Change. Shawn met Kevin last year in London. Kevin was responsible for the change program for 40,000 people at the Royal Bank of Scotland.

I have seen examples of this around what a meeting actually costs (see http://www.effectivemeetings.com/diversions/meetingcost.asp ), but have never seen it around preparing documentation. Can you imagine the different conversations in that Executive meeting if they were confronted with a figure of say $25,000 in preparing a pack for their approval? A figure which could equate to employing a person, full-time, in the organisation for six months.

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.

In late February and early March we ran workshops in Melbourne and Sydney with Kevin Bishop from the UK. The workshops focussed on Influencing Change using Stories. Until recently, Kevin was heading the change activities for 60,000 staff at the Royal Bank of Scotland. We learned heaps and the feedback from participants was fantastic.

The photo show the three of us (L to R: Shawn, Kevin, Mark) last Thursday at the LIW Centre for Leadership at Chowder Bay in Sydney. The photo below shows the group having lunch overlooking the harbour. You might as well do it in style!

Our venue in Melbourne was also fantastic - the headquarters of Lifesaving Victoria right on Sandridge Beach in Port Melbourne.

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.

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 was going to be difficult to surpass their last book, Made to Stick, where they showed us that people wont pay attention unless our message is simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and a story. And it was going to be even harder practising what they preached to make Switch stick. But I'm delighted to report that they've pulled it off and have created an engaging and useful work on how to change things when change is hard.

Switch is arranged around an analogy (immediately visual and sticky). When we are making a decision we're often torn between our rational, logical reasons and our emotional, intuitive feelings. Chip and Dan ask us to imagine an Elephant and its Rider (the mahout). The Rider represents the rational and logical. Tell the Rider what to do, provide a good argument and the Rider will do it. The Elephant, on the other hand, represents our emotions, our gut response. The Rider might like to avoid that hamburger and chips but there is very little the Rider can do if the Elephant really wants it (OK, so I'm telling you what happened last night). To complete their analogy they include the Path they are travelling along. If the Rider can direct the Elephant down a well prepared Path then there is a good chance for change. The Path might represent, for example, access to user friendly technology or effective office space design. Switch is arranged in three parts: Direct the Rider, Motivate the Elephant and Shape the Path.

On Saturday in 2000 ... In 1990 ... A doctor was asked ... Crystal Jones joined Teach for America in 2003 ... These are the first few words of the first four chapters and apart from the last chapter each starts with a story. And within each chapter are more stories. These stories are well chosen and illustrate the behaviours we need to adopt to effect change. The whole book is focussed on behaviours and rightly makes the point that change comes from changing people's behaviour. That's the level you need to take. A leader cannot afford to stay aloof. For change to occur they need to get into the detail as well as stay strategic.

As a business storyteller Switch is a treasure trove of stories to be retold in organisations. Last week I was running a strategy workshop and I wanted the group to identify a set of guiding principles for their organisation. So I told them the story of the Brazilian railway that was going broke and how Alexandre Behring and his CFO created four rules to guide everyone's spending behaviour to get them out of debt. I shared the rules with the participants and they knew exactly what I meant and were able to easily create their own guiding principles. Strategy execution is a change initiative and Chip and Dan advise us to script the critical moves.

Here is the structure of the book. Notice how each section is a pointer to behaviour.

Direct the Rider: Find the bright spots; Script the critical moves; Point to the destination

Motivate the Elephant: Find the feeling; Shrink the Change; Grow your people

Shape the Path: Tweak the environment; Build habits; Rally the herd

On page 58 we encounter our first clinic and I must admit I groaned slightly when I bumped into it. Getting me to do exercises while I'm reading is normally a pain. I was going to just skip the clinic but decided to have a read and the thing I noticed was that the repetition of the ideas in another context was really helping me to remember. I knew repetition is important but I guess the story approach sucked me in and reinforced it.

One the first things I check when I get a book like Switch is to see whether it is comprehensively referenced and what type of studies are being referred to (if any). Switch passed with flying colours. The endnotes are expansive and they share a swag of evidence for each point they make and often used the psychological experiments as stories rather than just presenting the facts.

Switch is a book that will be read by senior leaders. It's engaging, well written, funny in parts and insightful. If you're an change practitioner in an organisation I recommend you buy a handful of copies and give them to your leaders. In my experience they wont read it right away but then they'll jump on a flight and start and wont stop. At this point you'll not only have a supporter but someone who will compel your involvement. Malcolm Gladwell has served me well in the past and Switch is in the same league.

Last week I started a new Making Strategies Stick project with a large IT company. The guys I'm working with are the technical sales folk and as we were working out their strategic story they mentioned that the passion that was once there for their products seemed to be waning among some of their technical specialists.

These guys work closely with the sales people. The way they work together, however, varies dramatically from being merely instructed by the sales people to do demonstrations of the product (they call this being demo dollies) to working collaboratively as peers with the sales people.

I asked whether those who showed a lack of passion were also the ones treated as demo dollies. Th answer was yes.

Dan Pink has done a good job in his latest book, Drive, to show that there are three important factors that affect our motivation: purpose, mastery and autonomy. It seems that in this case those treated as demo dollies were losing their autonomy (and also unable to apply their mastery) and were losing the spark for the product. Collaboration (where collaboration is when peers work together to tackle complex activities--see our paper), on the other hand, provided all three factors.

Another good reason to get serious about collaboration in your business.

We often get asked whether we are running any public courses on our techniques but for the last couple of years we have reserved these courses for our clients.

But this February and March we are running one workshop on influencing change with stories in collaboration with Kevin Bishop, most recently the Royal Bank of Scotland's change manager in the UK.

If you would like to attend here are all the details.

We only have limited places so please let us know as soon as you can to secure a spot.

Dan and Chip Heath have a new book coming out (Feb) and they sent me a copy of the first chapter. The title is Switch and like their last best seller, Made to Stick, it promises to be a keeper. It's all about how to motivate people to change. The first chapter has left an indelible impression because of the strong image they conjured to explain what we need to consider to influence change: the Mahout (they call it The Rider), the Elephant and the Path.

Changing behaviour involves a struggle between our rational and well-reasoned thinking and our emotional urges. The mahout represents the rational and reasoned. If the mahout clearly understands where he needs to go he'll direct his charge that way.

The elephant represents emotional urges. While the elephant might be happy to go the way the mahout directs, if she decides to go another direction there is not a single thing the mahout can do about it.

The path represents anything that might impede or assist the mahout and the elephant to get to where they are going. You want the path to be as easy to follow as possible.

So how does this translate to a business setting? Imagine you're a leader of an organisation that's decided to compete on exemplary customer service. To engage the mahout you need a clear rationale describing why customer service is so important. You would find the research that shows the factors that influence customer service and illustrate to the mahout in everyone the concrete actions you want them to take. Engaging the Mahout, however, is the easy part and the one most organisations spend most of their time doing. The hard bit is the elephant.

Engaging the elephant, the emotion, will take action and stories about things that happened. You might start by telling some stories of customer service blunders to grab their attention. Here's one that happened to me recently. It's important you find stories from the organisation. Real life examples. Negative stories, however, often in themselves wont change behaviour, partly because people don't know exactly what they need to do to get it right. So you also need to find stories of great customer service from your company. We call them Gibson stories because William Gibson (the sci-fi writer) once said: "the future is already here; it's just unevenly distributed." You just need to find these stories that represent your company's future. Tell them. Get people to discuss them. Inspire that elephant.

After engaging the mahout and the elephant you need to pave the path and remove anything that's getting in the way of progress. This might be a rewards system that's encouraging the wrong behaviour. Or it might be an IT system that is unintegrated and hard for call centre staff to use slowing down their support for customers. There are a myriad of obstacles to remove from the path.

Don't forget, the Heath brothers were the authors of Made to Stick which dedicates a chapter to the power of stories. Chapter one is full of great stories. Some you might have already heard, such as the 424 gloves that save a company millions or the 100,000 lives saves by the Donald Berwick and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

The Heath brothers conclude the chapter by saying:

Whether the switch you seek is in your family, in your charity, in your organization, or in society at large, you’ll get there by making three things happen. You’ll direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path.

Photo credit: goofball12

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.

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.

Dan Pink TED talk has an important message: what scientists know about the detrimental effects of incentives remains largely unknown and unpractised by managers. He argues, which I totally agree, that we need to create workplaces which provide autonomy, possibility for mastery and purpose. These factors truly motivate us.

The video, see below, is also interesting for how Dan users stories. Take a look first then I will make some comments below.

Dan is very aware of the power of stories. In his book, A Whole New Mind, he dedicates a chapter to how important storytelling is as a skill. But he also knows that business people are scared by the term and when they hear the word 'story' they assume what is being said is made up, fluffy, unbusiness-like. So Dan frames his presentation as a legal case, focussed on the evidence, with the full persuasive power of the best legal minds (mind you he does some lovely self-deprecation at the start of the talk to connect with the audience).

Dan even goes as far as saying, "this is not a story, it is a fact ..."

But here's the thing. Dan's talk is full of stories. In fact he employs one of my favourite story patterns: the scientific experiment. Scientific experiments are great because to explain them you have to tell what the scientist did and when and the best ones of some unanticipated result--terrific elements for a story.

I counted 7 stories in Dan's presentation (one every 2. minutes or so). Quite a few for someone is telling the audience that he is not telling a story.

Late last year, a company approached us on the topic of employee engagement. They’d received the results of their biannual engagement survey and, as with previous years, realised that the data pointed them to strengths and potential weaknesses but didn't help understand what was really going on, or what to do about it. The data might show that 63% of staff agreed or strongly agreed with the statement 'I am proud to work for this company' and this might be down 6% from the previous survey. On its own however, the data doesn't help with the question "what does this mean and what should be done? "

Narrative approaches are excellent for exploring these sorts of issues and helping organisations find out what is really going on, and what actions they can take to reinforce things that are going well, and improving things that need work. The survey data is vital 'targeting information' but on its own it is an insufficient basis for planning. Thus, exploring employee engagement is a natural marriage of traditional approaches such as surveys and the emerging practice of narrative.

Our approach to staff engagement looks like this:

• Employee engagement surveys often focus on areas such as: do people say positive or negative things about the organisation; their intent to stay with the company; and whether they are motivated to strive to do the best they can for the company. In preparing for the narrative project, the survey data is examined to identify the themes to be explored, the geographic or structural areas to focus on and the people to involve in the project. Key stakeholders are also asked for their views on the survey results and the things that are of most concern or surprise to them.
• We use anecdote circles during the 'discovery phase' of these projects to collect a large number of examples (anecdotes) of how staff at all levels in the organisation experience issues on a day-to-day basis. The anecdote circles are an intervention in themselves as they get groups of people sharing their experiences; people value the opportunity to be listened to and participants learn from each other about how things get done. Recently, during an anecdote circle, a participant related how he received a call early one morning from his manager asking if he’d heard about the severe storm warning for his area (he hadn't). The manager was worried about him driving to work in the storm and requested that he work from home that day. The guy telling the story was really impressed by the phone call. This was a great example of how small actions can really help build employee engagement.
• In the sensemaking phase a significant and diverse groups of influencers are exposed to a cross-section of the collected anecdotes and are facilitated to engage in dialogue with each other to identify issues and themes regarding the current situation. The idea of sensemaking is to develop a rich and common understanding among these influencers of the current situation and its history. Exposure to the anecdotes provides participants with insights into what really goes on in the organisation; this can be quite confronting at times. Nonetheless, sensemaking is a vital step as the individual and collective understand it provides is the springboard for deciding what action to take. The sensemaking workshop takes between 4 hours to a full day and one of its valuable side effects is that individuals will often change (deliberately or sub-consciously) their behaviour back in the workplace as a result of the new understanding they’ve developed. This is an important step as one of the key actions to improve staff engagement is to 'stop doing things that piss staff off.'
• Complex problems cannot be 'solved' in any traditional sense and the way to make progress is to try things and see what happens. Using the deep understanding developed during the sensemaking phase, we involve the influencers in identifying the actions that can be taken to move the situation in a desirable direction. Our approach to this stage (which we call initiative design) is strongly influenced by the characteristics of complex problems meaning we encourage the organisation to identify lots of small scale actions that can be implemented at an individual or team level, based on the knowledge that with complex problems, little things can make a big difference. We also encourage the development of a 'continual improvement process' that aims to get these changes embedded in the fabric of the organisation.
• The final stage is to monitor what happens as a result of the actions taken - reinforcing the patterns that are beneficial and disrupting the ones that aren't. This is achieved through the embedding process developed during sensemaking and by using techniques such as most significant change. A planned monitoring regime is important as it helps detect changes - it also works as an incentive to implement the actions identified during intervention design

Since the initial approach, several other unrelated opportunities have emerged to work with companies to explore their employee engagement outcomes. Our extensive work in leadership/management development also has a strong link to employee engagement (as the main roles of a manager can be summarised as 'driving performance' and 'building engagement'). It looks like employee engagement is a growing area for us to apply narrative approaches.

I can't remember who first said to me "you have two ears and one mouth, and you should use them in that proportion" but it is one of the best pieces of advice I have ever received. Also, when working in many organisations, I notice it is not applied that widely. Shawn and I have come across two examples earlier this year where 'listeners' were let go and noisy and opinionated people were never considered to be candidates for retrenchment because of their 'visible contribution' to the organisation (it was probably more their 'audible contribution'). These sorts of decisions further undermine an organisation's capability to make progress with complex problems.

Listening has a vital role in tackling complex problems, such as any change initiative, either social or organisational. We use our Narrative Insight (story listening) techniques to explore and help make sense of the patterns relating to these complex issues. The following excerpt from The McKinsey Quarterly emphasizes why we should put more effort into listening and less into telling:

The lesson is clear - you need to listen to and act on the needs and perspectives of the stakeholders. Even if you don't like what they are saying. People value what they have a sense of ownership in and you need to listen to find out what that is. And where there is anger, resentment etc around an issue I have found the advice of Professor Brenda Dervin to be spot on.."anger dissipates when people are listened to".

If you happen to know of the original research referred to in the McKinsey article we would love to hear about it.

Reference: 1. The McKinsey Quarterly 2009 Number 2, pages 101-109

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."

Senator Kate Lundy hosted yesterday's Publicsphere #2 event on Government 2.0. I attended Parliament House for the morning and 'watched' online throughout the afternoon (using the live blog, video stream and the twitter traffic (#publicsphere). It was interesting to watch presentations to an audience of 150 people, the majority of whom had laptops open and were twittering (about the event in the main) and googling relevant info to add into the twitter traffic. Personally, I felt a little overwhelmed by the many channels of information and didn't get much value from the presentations themselves.

Things I liked about the event were:

• 15 minute presentation format - this forced speakers to have a few clear messages
• The diverse technologies available meant there was something for everyone
• Meeting some very interesting people and catching up with some people that I haven't seen for ages
• It was very well organised and all up it ran pretty smoothly
• Seeing the passion in Kate Lundy's eyes for getting this stuff happening

Things I didn't like about the event were:

• A constant stream of presentations with no provision for discussion. It appeared that the organisers thought that electronic interaction via twitter and commenting on the live blog obviated the need for people to speak to each other. Exacerbating this was the preference for eating into the few breaks to make up time.
• Realising that I couldn't cope too well with the multiple inputs while attempting to build a mind map of things that resonated with me (and watching others appear to handle it with ease). I did learn a lot about twitter on the day.

One of the key themes was the urgent need for change in the people component of the equation. Politicians and public servants live in a culture where behaviour is focussed on control of information, avoidance of risk etc. Not that they have any bad intent, they just live in a world where this is the norm. Nearly every speaker touched on this issue. Nonetheless I expect that tradition will hold and only a miniscule proportion of funding will address the change component. One approach is to find out government positive deviants and work out how to influence others to adopt their behaviours and methods. There must be some out there.

I started work this week on a major change project. Our 'three journeys' concept for embedding change and making strategies stick is really resonating. I must admit to walking into the project with some trepidation...a broken organisation that needs to be fixed or 'blown away' (a nice metaphor...not!). After four days there I feel a sense of enormous optimism. There is an alignment of circumstances that provide a great impetus for change. This is the project of a lifetime for the leadership team - the permission to create an amazing transformation.

On Friday afternoon one of the team noted that it was not just a journey we are starting on, its an adventure.

The technology we use changes the way we organise and the way we organise effects the technologies we use. This hand-in-glove interaction is called co-evolution. Take the example of the invention of the spinning frame during the industrial revolution of the 18th century. The spinning frame made possible large scale cloth production and created the need for factories, which in turn affected how water and steam were used to drive machinery in those factories.¹

Are we seeing a similar co-evolution between information dissemination technology and how knowledge programs are organised? The two killer apps for the PC have been the word processor and the spreadsheet. With these two tools we were able to create documents. Consequently many knowledge sharing initiatives focus on creating and sharing documents. This limited us to sharing what we could write down.

YouTube started in 2005 (here is the first video uploaded to the site). It’s a site for sharing videos. Now that it's easy to share videos more companies are building this form of information dissemination into its knowledge sharing programs. The interesting thing is that the tool changes the type of knowledge shared. It seems to me that videos encourage us to share practices and tell a story of what happened or how to do something. This type of knowledge helps us share values, principles and lessons in a more compact and digestible way. Sure, documents can be used to do that too but that wasn’t the default use and it took so much effort.

As we witness the rise of the video we'll need to develop other skills to make the most of it. Most importantly, you guessed it, video creators will need to be adept at finding and telling stories. Just as we learned the language of documents (structure, headings, font sizes, margins, footnotes etc.) we will need to learn the language of video. And that language will partly involve characters, events, action, time and place.

1. Beinhocker, E. D. (2006). The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics. Boston, Harvard Business School Press.

Yesterday I popped out for a meeting at the National Australia Bank. They have a new CEO, Cameron Clyne, and last week he announced a restructure that has substantially flattened the organisation. While the restructure has been the topic of lots of conversations and stories inside and outside the bank, Cameron has done two other things that has got employees talking.

Now these stories might not be 100% factual. But as story guru Robert McKee points out, "What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens." These are the stories some staff are telling about the new CEO and they view his actions as exciting and energising. In their mind a wonderful change is going on.

Then something interesting happened in the meeting. The person I was talking to said it was incredibly difficult to gain direct access to the CEO. That he had a coterie of minders that he brought from New Zealand with him that intercept any approach. And that this is how it should be because he is an incredibly busy man with tremendous responsibilities.

It's interesting that the positive stories created by the meeting room and bubble change seemed to create a positive aura over other activities involving the CEO.

A lesson for leaders is that in addition to be able to find and tell your own stories, it's also important to do things that create positive stories in the organisation. Be remarkable so people remark on your behaviour. But also listen to what stories you create and what people infer from them.

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.

I've just uploaded the video of the presentation where you will see the embarrassing larger than life size portrait of me in my undies. Please skip over that part quickly.

Building a collaborative workplace using stories from Shawn Callahan on Vimeo.

Here's my presentation (with audio) that I delivered to the Victorian Public Sector Continuous Improvement Network (VPSCIN) yesterday.

I'm still trying to work out how to sync the audio with each slide. The Slideshare slidecast tool failed me so any help would be greatly appreciated. The main problem was that the blue beginning and end markers didn't appear when I selected a slide.

Here is my presentation from the Ark KM for the Experienced Practitioner. I have to admit that it probably doesn't make too much sense without the commentary and the note are not the best but happy to answer any questions.

The presentation is a case study illustration of our three journey narrative approach to organisational change.

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?

To change the way we work we need to change our mental models, and that requires insight.

In The Neuroscience of Leadership David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz describe how our improved understanding of the brain is helping to reorient how we design organisational change initiatives.

The article recommends leaders create situations where their people get a new insight into how they view things: what is the dominant mental model?

One of the most effective technique to help create this insight is archetype extraction. It involves collecting anecdotes from people in the organisation on a theme such as customer service and extracting the archetypes from the many stories.  

An archetype is a embodiment of the organisation's culture in the form of a complex yet familiar character. An archetype is usually partly good and partly bad; a complex mix of traits. Not to be confused with a stereotype, which is typically an oversimplification based on simple categorisation or role: "Oh, he's a librarian."

We take these anecdotes into a workshop of 10-20 thought leaders and influencers who could benefit from an alternative perspective.

The workshop participants identify the characters and their character traits from the collected anecdotes on customer service and using a facilitation process they morph into the archetypes, which are often drawn by a cartoonist for greater visual impact.

The cartoons in the post depict some of the archetypes that illustrated the culture of a large Australia organisation. Once the archetypes are identified people can then use them to discuss some of the un-discussables without getting personal.

Most importantly the participants will have obtain a new insight on how the organisation views itself or another group.

Three journeys: A narrative approach to successful organisational change

Our new workshop now has a new name. We're calling it

Putting Stories to Work: Delivering meaningful Change and Engagement

What managers need today is a tool that empowers them to inspire people into action. Narrative techniques can deliver a range of benefits to an organization. It's just a matter of learning the techniques and then putting them to practice.

We've redesigned our narrative techniques workshop with a focus on engagement. Over two days we aim to teach managers how to create a resolve among their staff so that they see the value of the change efforts being undertaken in the organization and participate enthusiastically.

There will be lots of opportunities to practice the techniques and learn from each other's feedback during the sessions. Join us on November 11 and 12 in Melbourne. And if you're keen for us to come to your city, we'd love to hear from you.

Read more and register

A big thanks to Dave Pollard, Nerida Hart, Chris Colton, Luke Naismith, Jeff de Cagna , and Bret Treasure for their suggestions on the workshop name. The conversations triggered some good ideas.

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.

Last year Robyn and I ran an interesting project for a large government agency to help Aboriginal people join the department and become productive as quickly as possible. More importantly the department wanted to retain more of their Aboriginal staff who would often leave for a myriad of complex reasons. Of course the project was narrative based.

A couple of months ago we presented a paper at LearnX describing this project and what we learned. I just remembered and uploaded the paper to our whitepapers section. Love to hear what you think.

New research has shown that we notice popular people and don't notice unpopular people. OK, so we probably didn't need research to tell us that but Cameron Anderson and Aiwa Shirako were investigating how reputations form and Dave Munger at Cognitive Daily describe the results this way:

It turns out that your reputation for cooperativeness is only affected by your behavior if you're already popular. If you're not popular, it appears that no one takes notice of your behavior, so it has no impact on your reputation. People with lots of social connections can build a good reputation -- or a bad one -- with much more ease than people with few social connections.

So for those people doing social network analyses spotting all the connectors you should also be providing these hubs with a warning: it's true you are in a great place to build your reputation but also equally good place to tear it apart.

Cameron Anderson, Aiwa Shirako (2008). Are individuals' reputations related to their history of behavior? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94 (2), 320-333 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.94.2.320

I went to KM Australia this week and the issue of trust was mentioned many times. I noticed, however, that very few people went beyond generic statements like trust is essential for knowledge sharing, trust is the bandwidth of communication etc. I find these high-level statements unhelpful in practice and so I suggested to the conference participants that we come up with some specific trust creating behaviours and then use a dotmocracy to vote on what everyone thought was most important.

Here are the trust creating behaviours I suggested. I also invited others to suggest their own. There were two additions; the last two in this list.

• Being open and honest about your intentions
• Looking after your colleagues when times are tough
• Consistently delivering good work
• Team members are involved in decision-making
• Being able to speak your mind in meetings
• Being generous with what you know
• Giving credit where credit is due
• Making promises and keeping them
• Being prepared to allow the group to come up with "your idea" rather than tell them how you believe it must be
• Creating an environment where positive feedback always comes first and participation is encouraged

Here are the results. About 50 people participated in the vote.

'Making promises and keeping them' comes out on top followed by 'Being open and honest about your intentions' and 'Giving credit where credit is due.'

There were only two votes cast on the new proposals, the last two listed above, which probably reflected an error in our process. They were added to the dotmocracy after most people had already voted.

What do you think are the essential behaviours for fostering trust? Remember, behaviours are something you can spot, not abstract concepts like dedication, being humble or caring for your colleagues.

Last week I ran a half day workshop to get a group thinking about their knowledge strategy. We got into a conversation about what things constrain knowledge-related practices such as peer assists, after action reviews, decision games etc., and one of the participants hit the nail on the head, "we have our real work and then everything else is an add on."

So if knowledge practices are not defined as 'real work' then you will face an uphill battle.

How might you turn things around? Here's an approach using Patterson et al's Influencer model.

Identify the vital behaviours you want to encourage. Search for these behaviours by seeking out people and groups who are already great at incorporating knowledge-related practices and observe them, collect stories about how they get things done. Compare these observations with groups who are poor at implementing knowledge-related behaviours.

A vital behaviour might be: Managers ask how the after action review went and what was learned from the process.

So now you need to encourage this behaviour (and probably 2 or 3 others, not 8 or 10 others). The Influencer model suggests 6 sources of influence to draw on. There are two basic questions that must be answered in the positive for someone to change: Is it worth it? and Can I do it? These two questions are reflected in the two columns in this diagram, motivation and ability.

1. Make the undesirable desirable. This is all about tapping into people's intrinsic motivators. For example, in this case you might focus on what it means to be a professional and the upmost importance of learning.

2. Surpass your limits. You can't expect people to adopt new practices without building new skills. This source of influence is about helping people build their abilities. It's about giving opportunities to try things out, engage in deliberate practice and obtain fast and effective feedback.

3. Harness peer pressure. If people you respect are doing it then it's more likely you will do it. Find the opinion leaders and get them on board first. The rest will follow.

4. Find strength in numbers. Actively build your social networks so you can tap into them when needed.

5. Design rewards and demand accountability. Use rewards carefully and only after the other sources of influence have been exercised. Link the extrinsic rewards to the vital behaviours rather than outcomes.

6. Change the environment. Physical spaces affect the way we work. Give people visual cues, create places to work, use the physical environment to reinforce the behaviours you desire.

"Credit is infinitely divisible. Give it away every chance you get, and there's always plenty left for you."

Don Berwick, Head if Institute of Healthcare Improvement 100,000 lives campaign (I see it is now 5 million lives), quoted in Influencer p 164.

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.

It's obvious to most people that good leaders are good storytellers. Stories help inspire action because they transport the listener to experience the events recounted in the story in a way that conveys emotion, context and a picture of what happened, and why is happened. We remember these stories. They help change our minds and in doing so, change our behaviours. Storytelling is an important skill for leaders.

But it's not the only way to use stories to help leaders improve their capabilities.

18 months ago we started a narrative-based leadership development program for a global pharmaceutical company. We collected 150 stories of good and bad management behaviour from the staff and then use these stories in a two day program. Twelve managers attend every month and one of the activities we do with them is to facilitate a conversation around the question, which stories are most significant?

One of the stories often selected as significant is a seemingly simple account of a woman whose manager stops whatever he was doing whenever she visited his office, moves to a table in the middle of the room and invites her to sit down and then totally focusses on her. She felt that she was being listened to and her ideas were important. It was remarkable for this woman because other managers didn't do that. The leaders in the program often choose this story as significant because they feel that if only they could get more managers doing this it would create a groundswell of change.

A few weeks ago we refreshed the stories for this company in preparation for a new phase of leadership development, and lo and behold, staff told stories of how their manager, whenever they knock on their office door, he or she stops what they’re doing, comes out from behind their desk and… you guessed it… focuses totally on them and their issues.

Imagine if we conducted the leadership development program by listing the behaviours a good leader displays and then tried to persuade them with logic and reasoning. Change is unlikely. But in this case the leaders worked things out for themselves and inspired themselves to change.

Both approaches to using stories to enhance leadership capabilities are important.

If you want to help your leaders be better storytellers, then get them along to our Storytelling for Business Leaders workshop or we can bring it to your organisation.

If you want to learn how to collect and make sense of stories as a way to change behaviours them come along to our Business Narrative workshop.

We run these workshops in Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth, or anywhere else in Australia or the world for that matter :-)

In a blog post of 9 June over on The Melcrum Blog, Abi Signorelli describes how leaders in her organisation were blogging internally and how trust in the leadership has increased tremendously as a result. Apparently some of them are even twittering.

We posted previously about the contribution of internal blogging to organisational culture change. Good to see more examples emerging. Are there any others out there?

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.

David Drake (renowned narrative coach) and I have written this white paper to pull together our thinking on how to use our three journeys approach to organisational change and also add a coaching perspective. I hope you find it useful and of course feedback is welcome. Here's a little blurb.

This paper describes the approach we take with clients to successfully foster change in their organisations. It is based on our deep knowledge of both complexity and narratives, and it reflects our holistic approach in working at both systemic and personal levels to help organisations and their people move forward. Coaching is integral to our process at each step of the way and to our clients’ success in reaching their change and improvement goals. Our approach helps leaders and organisations embrace the need for change, approach it openly, prepare for it fully, and achieve the critical outcomes—whether it be a new technology, a turnaround, a new strategy or some other cause.

David Drake and I have written a new white paper describing a narrative approach to successful organisational change. We've built on our three journeys metaphor, which you might remember was inspired by the epic exploration of the the US West by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Apart from describing the three journeys we've drawn a set of lessons from the Corps of Discovery (the nickname for the expedition) for each of our three journeys. Here are the lessons from our first journey:

• It is important to be clear on sharing the rewards before there are any.
• Travelling requires both authority and freedom/permission.
• Change requires an organisation to venture into unknown territory; it is as much about discovery as it is about design.
• Every change process has its “St. Louis”—a jumping off point into the unknown, a hub for action, and a platform to which one can return.
• Often the landscape changes merely as a result of setting out on the journey.

If you'd like to early notification and the ability to get this paper before we publish it more widely, please sign up for our monthly newsletter. In the next few days I will share the lessons for the second and third journey.

When we start on a major change project we will often run a number of workshops with the leadership team to really get them to own and define the project. A big part of this activity is getting this group to collaborate and work as a team. In the past we have run sociometry exercises, anecdote circles and future backwards activities to get this group to gel. But I have a much better way now thanks to Seth Kahan's jumpstart storytelling technique.

How to run a jumpstart storytelling session

• Divide the participants into groups of 6
• Ask everyone to provide a concrete and specific example in response to a story eliciting question that is related to the objective of the workshop or project. Most recently I ask a workshop participants to recall when they have been proudest of the work they or their colleagues have done?
• Each person gets 90 seconds to tell their story.
• When everyone in the group has told one story ask the participants to remember the story that was most powerful for them; what resonated the most. And ask them to remember who told that story.
• Get everyone to switch groups to there is as many new faces as possible in their new group.
• Ask everyone to retell their story they have just told. Because this will feel a little weird I suggested they observe how their story changes and improves in the retelling. Again 90 seconds per story. At the end of everyone retelling their story reassess which story you think is most powerful and remember the storyteller.
• Depending on the size of the group you can switch groups again.
• Now the fun begins. Ask everyone to remember the person who told the most powerful, relevant, engaging story and go over to them and place your hand on their shoulder and keep it there. After a while a network of people forms and clusters appear revealing the high impact stories. Invite the people the group chose to retell their story to the whole group. Lead the applause at the end of each telling.

The energy goes through the roof with this technique and people get to hear stories they have never heard before. Most importantly the group gets to know each other at a deeper level. There is one more advantage as well if your project is narrative based: the leaders experience the power of narrative in the first 5 minutes of the project.

Larry Lessig has a presentation style named after him. You guessed it, the Lessig Method. Professor Lessig is a copyright expert and champion of creative commons. And in this presentation he demonstrates the power of presenting stories before presenting his argument. Steve Denning makes the point in his latest book, The Secret Language of Leadership, that if someone has a strong opinion and you present them with an argument to change their mind, it only serves to reinforce their strong opinion, regardless of how good your argument is. However if we are presented with a story illustrating the failures of the current situation followed by an aspirational story, then the person is more likely to take notice of a following new point of view. Enjoy this 18 minute video.

Collaboration brings with it change and complexity and uncertainty. How are we going to do this? What will happen next? Why should we work like that?... are some of the questions that mark the beginning of a collaborative project. It’s all a state of mind! A matter of perspective.

I’m Chandni and I’m new at Anecdote. My first blog is about my experience in managing collaboration and change and an interesting technique - a 10-second test!

To pursue my passion for knowledge, narratives, complexity, people, culture, and change, I’ve flown all the way from UK (where I did my MBA) via Mumbai (India, where I am originally from) to Canberra. My journey at Anecdote started on October 22 and I’m having a great time doing what I really love.

In my previous roles (as Chief Knowledge Developer and Head of the Knowledge Initiative at an ITeS company), I always thought that bringing about change in the culture was a simple thing. Our workforce was young and spirited and we were innovative and had an open working environment…what could be difficult about that?

Well, I was obviously very wrong and spent a few years figuring out why some people share what they know quite easily, some literally ‘find’ obstacles and put them in the way or some simply don’t want to be disturbed. So I divorced the explicit aspect and started exploring the social aspects of knowledge-sharing behavior, and in talking to people I discovered that narratives have a unique power that often remains untapped. Aligning the right technique to the right situation, that’s where the trick lies. I’m guilty of missing target too!

Let’s change that.

At Anecdote, we continuously seek and design techniques to deal with the complexity within organizations by understanding the ‘story behind the story’. What stories are people saying about an event or experience in their workplace?

Now, (this is my MBA talking) a lot has been said about how denial is the first stage in change management. And collaboration initiatives are a big change for people sometimes. BUT the more important aspect is that there are reasons and stories that form this denial in people’s minds.

Here’s an interesting technique I stumbled upon on Ken Thompson’s blog. He has some good collaboration techniques listed, but this one is a great insight. He calls it a 10 second test to assess people's reaction to change.

How can you quickly find out what each team member's number one concern is about working in this scenario?

Dr Lewis recommends you get each of them to repeat the following 5 words out loud without thinking about it too much:

"We can’t do that here”

Listen carefully to which of the five words they stress – if its:

We – they are worried about their Identity

Can’t – they are worried about their beliefs and values

Do – they are worried about their skills

That – they are worried about their behavior

Here – they are worried about the environment

It might then be useful to probe the domains the participants seem most concerned about using anecdote circles to collect stories about the concerns that in fact may be the cause of their resistance or concern.

When you try it out, let us know how it went for you. We’d be happy to hear your story ☺

I'm giving a presentation to the Australian Institute of Professional Intelligence Officers (AIPIO) conference in October so I'm keeping my eye out for relevant news items. Here's one passed on to me by Nerida Hart. Any other pointers would be appreciated. The topic is narrative approaches to knowledge retention.

Young feds bring intell changes: A workforce bought up to use collaboration tools is making the CIA Web 2.0-savvy

“How do you transform analysis?” asked Thomas Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence for analysis at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). “One word: attitude. For people to collaborate and bring new and vital skills to the intelligence community, we need to change our attitude.”

Technorati Tags: intelligence

Just discovered this interesting blog on how designers are using the built environment to control our behaviour. There is an interesting post on how a European airport cafe removed all the handy flight monitors in their vicinity so patrons would not sit in the cafe too long. They would get worried that they might have missed their flight. I remember McDonalds doing something similar by installing immovable and uncomfortable chairs.

Here is how the Dan Lockton describes his blog topic.

‘Architectures of Control’ are features designed into things which intentionally attempt to restrict or enforce certain behaviour on the part of the users. The most prevalent examples are DRM and other attempts to control how users can interact with software and data, but similar thinking (in different degrees) is evident in many aspects of the built environment - such as anti-loiter and anti-homeless benches - and in product design in general. The term ‘architectures of control’ is used by Lawrence Lessig in the seminal Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, although the basic idea has been expressed in a number of fields by many different people.

And did you know that there are water detection stickers on phones?

(via Savage Minds)

Technorati Tags: design, control architecture

The way you enter an organisation has a big impact on how you perceive the place you work. The recruitment process (really part of staff induction) creates a range of expectations and if these expectations are unmet a subtle erosion of trust occurs—not what you want on day 1. A common view of staff induction is that it all happens the day you start and mostly over within a week. A typical induction involves being taken around the floor by you manager to meet your new colleagues and shown the places to eat, then the new employee sits through a session with a group of other new starters where senior people tell what they think you should know—strategy, policies, who's who in the zoo. Invariably there is too much information to take in on day 1.

I have been asking people, “How long after starting here did you feel you really knew the organisation and job you were doing?” Most people said it took them 12-18 months in a large organisation to really feel on top on things. Staff induction, therefore, needs to be more gradual and unfold over time as we experience the organisation we've joined. We need a slower and longer-term approach, one that better balances intellectual and emotional learning.

Here's how I reckon this might work.

Day 1—the basics of survival, security passes, floor plan, toilets, colleagues, managers, colleagues sitting down for coffee to let you know of the gotchas to avoid

Week 1—why you are here and how your work fits into the big picture, cycles of activities, people you need to know, show how to elicit stories from people, meet some of the people you need to know and get them to tell a story or two, where to find information such as policies and processes and the staff directory, team lunch

Month 1—how to get your expenses paid, stuff about pays, people you need to know, conversation about how to get ahead around here, know what managers to avoid, conversation with your manager about what you need to do to make a good contribution, understand the wider network (check out the social network charts)

Quarter 1—reflect of what you have achieved so far and discuss with your manager, ask “where do things happen here?”, understand your purpose and how it links to what the organisation is trying achieve, know who you can trust, have lunch and coffees with people, ask questions and stay curious.

Year 1—sit back and think about what you learnt, help a new employee get up and running, tell them your stories of how you started, wonder what you don't know,

Staff induction is simply learning how you fit in and learning is social. Each step of the way conversations are necessary. Here are some more things I believe about learning. If you think about staff induction as a learning process we immediately understand why relying solely on a classroom approach is ineffective.

The job of HR professionals is to provide the formal induction activities and then support the informal methods in the full knowledge that induction occurs primarily informally over a period of a year of so.

Technorati Tags: hr, staff induction

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

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

Strategies should result in a set of actions making the organisation more valuable to whoever it serves. Knowledge strategies are no different but most organisations develop a knowledge strategy in the following way:

1. the company engages consultants to analyse their needs
2. the leaders are asked, "what result would you like to see at the end of the project?" The consultants capture this information as the project's vision.
3. the consultants interview staff, conduct focus groups and compile an inventory of important knowledge assets
4. gaps are identified between what currently occurs and what needs to happen to achieve the vision
5. a report is written and there's considerable debate over the structure, format and wording of this document
6. the knowledge strategy and associated implementation plan is presented to the executive group for their approval
7. everyone is exhausted but pleased with the document
8. there is little energy left for the actions needed to make the required changes

Don't get me wrong, a process like this is what’s mostly needed to undertake an effective knowledge strategy. It suffers, however, from a problem of balance. The weight of effort is on developing the document—the strategy or plan. Little energy or process is left for people to take actions that will change how things are actually done. The further the organisation gets away from the initial strategy development exercise, the greater the apathy to implement the original plan. The ideal situation is one where the top down focus on defining what to do is balanced with a process that enables people to do things that will make the organisation more valuable to whoever it serves.

So what if we put less effort into the knowledge strategy design and more into implementing strategic actions?

There are three reasons why we should shift the balance from viewing the strategy as a thing to redressing the balance towards the process for implementing the strategy.

1. businesses are less predictable and long-term, linear plans rarely achieve their stated goals
2. embedding actions in the day-to-day activities of the organisation allows new ways to tackle problems to emerge
3. the process moves the responsibility for making a difference to how knowledge is created, shared and used to everyone in the organisation rather than a typically under-resourced knowledge management unit

So how might this look? The best solution is one developed by people in the organisation, one that develops the process for embedding the strategic actions into the day-to-day activities. To give you an idea of what it might look like here are some ideas adapted from David Maister's suggested approach for conducting a strategy.

The initial knowledge strategy design should result in some objectives, which might include things like:

• improve knowledge sharing
• enhance innovation
• reduce impact of people leaving (knowledge retention)
• build skills and know-how
• improve everyone's ability to find relevant knowledge when they need it
• improve how we learn from experience

Ideally, there should only be two or three objectives. Six is too many.
The process starts by giving each group within the organisation one sheet of paper for each objective. Each sheet has four columns. The group lists, for each objective, the actions they are going to take over the next three months to help achieve the objectives. A senior member of staff works with the group acting as a friendly sceptic or mentor. This mentor's role is to ask question, helping the group to stretch their plans or to reign in over enthusiasm. At the end of the session, the mentor sets a date to meet with the group again in three months where they will review how they went, what they learned and establish a new set of actions for the following three months.

The four columns to fill in for each objective are:

• the action to be done
• who is responsible for ensuring the action is completed
• the date the action will be completed
• a description of how the group will know the action has been completed

It’s important that the group focuses on actions and not goals. For example, if the objective is “improve knowledge sharing” then rather than provide a goal such as, “build better relationships with the policy division,” describe a tangible action like “organise 3 brown bag seminars with the policy division.”

By repeating this activity every three months the organisation begins to embed knowledge-related activities into their day to day business. It becomes second nature. The three-month time frame also feels achievable and tangible. It gives the groups something in the foreseeable future to aim for. One last benefit of a shorter time frame for action is that it enables the organisation to sense and respond to the changing business environment making it more nimble and resilient.

You might be thinking, “Yeh, but what about those initiatives that take longer than three months to accomplish?” Of course this will be the case. Sometimes the organisation will be able to identify longer-term initiatives, such as the adoption of communities of practice or an intranet implementation, in the initial knowledge strategy design which can be implemented organisation-wide. Here I am arguing for a balance between the more traditional approach to developing a knowledge strategy with a greater emphasis on embedding the knowledge actions.

Maister, D. H. “Ready, Set, Go: Fast-track Strategy.” Strategy in Professional Business  Retrieved 27 February, 2007, from http://davidmaister.com/podcasts/4/45/.

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

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

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

A while ago I argued that the target metaphor was inappropriate for change projects. The idea that anyone could accurately define a change target, aim at it, and then hit it with a well shot arrow was, at best, an illusion. In most cases the possible, beneficial end states are wide and varied.

So the question is, how do you define an intent that provides direction, inspires action yet is not overly prescriptive? John F. Kennedy provides a good example.

In his now famous ‘man on the moon’ speech, Kennedy kicked off the US entry to the space race with the following goal:

First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.

This statement of intent is concrete (landing a man on the moon), active (landing, returning, achieving), simple, time bound (before this decade is out), and is in the form of a mini story (land the man and get him home safely).

The military are well versed in providing strategic intents for missions because they know that No plan survives contact with the enemy. Chip and Dan Health explain the military’s use of commanders intent (CI).

CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top, of every order, specifying the plan’s goal, the desired end-state of an operation. At high levels of the Army the CI may be relatively abstract: “Break the will of the enemy in the Southwest region.”

Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad suggest three key aspects of an effective strategic intent:

1. Sense of Direction. "Strategic intent (...) implies a particular point of view about the long-term market or competitive position that a firm hopes to build over the coming decade or so". It should be a view of the future – conveying a unifying and personalising sense of direction.
2. Sense of Discovery. A strategic intent is differentiated; it implies a competitively unique point of view about the future. It holds out to employees the promise of exploring new competitive territory.
3. Sense of Destiny. Strategic intent has an emotional edge to it; it is a goal that employees perceive as inherently worthwhile.

These examples provide a sense of what a change management team needs to achieve, but we still need a way to develop a useful intent. As you might guess, my suggestion is largely participative, using stories and question-based. But I have run out of time to finish this post so I will write another making some suggestions on how you can create your strategic intent for a change management program. In the meantime any other examples or descriptions of how you do it would be appreciated.

Social searching is the next big step in helping you get the search results you need. This is how it works. Someone in your community creates a community search engine for your group and then everyone in the community starts using it. When the results appear you add value by telling the engine which results don’t belong and which ones should be promoted to the top of the list. The more the community uses the engine the better the results. 

I’ve created three social search engines using Swiki from Eurekstar:

• people issues related to knowledge management
• evaluation of hard to measure initiatives
• meaningful organisational change

If you are interested in these three topics please bookmark these links and use the search feature as much as you can. We can then see, as a community, how we can improve our searchability.

Wherever I go I hear the same thing, “I’d love to do it, but we just don’t have enough time.”

‘It’ is anything they know is important, and could make a difference, but they are totally overwhelmed with their current tasks. The thought of something else is just too much.

So why is there such a lack of time? Here are my top 7 reasons:

1. Someone else sets your agenda and fills you schedule with tasks
2. You don’t know what to say ‘no’ to
3. We can do so many things these days, so we do
4. We want to keep an eye on everything because the world is complex and changing and we are constantly distracted
5. Our physical workspaces encourage distractions
6. We are more connected than ever and technology keeps the channels open
7. Being generalists we tackle new things over and over and never are really proficient

These suggestions will help you wrest control of you time.

1. Learn a task management method like Getting Things Done. I’d recommend getting David Allen’s book of the same name and put it into practice. Better still, get your organisation to invest in a GTD training program (addresses issues 1 and 3).
2. Understand your priorities and work out how your work fits in to the big picture. If it doesn’t fit in to either the big picture or your priorities then say ‘no’ (issue 2)
3. Get into a community of practice and learn how to work smarter from your peers and with your peers that already do it. Rather than try and keep up with all the changes in your discipline, share the workload. Social book-marking is one possible tool (issues 4 & 7)
4. Periodically close down the communication channels. Turn off the mobile, Skype, email and then find a cafe where you can work anonymously. You’ll be amazed at how much work you’ll get done (issues 5 & 6).

Obviously this is not a comprehensive assessment of the why there is such a lack of time in organisations and what to do about it (I just don’t have the time ). But what advice would you give to someone who seems to be flat out like a lizard drinking?

[Thanks to Nancy White for a conversation this morning about this issue]

Gallup has done a survey of 1000 US employees investigating the relationship between engaged employees and innovation. At first glance it seems impressive. There are lots of numbers, a couple of graphs and even a statement at the bottom of the article describing the survey limitations. The results, however, hinge on their definitions of employee engagement (see pretty graphic).

So how did they determined who fell into which engagement category? This seems to be a vital missing piece. There is no indication of the questions they asked or the scales they used. Without this information the rest of the ‘data’ is nonsense to me. Here are some of the findings. 

When GMJ researchers surveyed U.S. workers, 59% of engaged employees strongly agreed with the statement that their current job "brings out [their] most creative ideas." On the flip side, only 3% of actively disengaged employees strongly agreed that their current job brings out their most creative ideas.

The study also showed that engaged workers were much more likely to react positively to creative ideas offered by fellow team members. When asked to rate their level of agreement with the statement "I feed off the creativity of my colleagues," roughly 6 in 10 engaged employees (61%) strongly agreed, while only about 1 in 10 actively disengaged employees (9%) gave the same answer.

In the race for evidence-based management I imagine people are taking these results and believing what they read and quoting the figures (fully referenced of course) in business cases as if they are gospel. Perhaps I’m missing something but without an understanding of how these categorisations are made it’s difficult to assess the results’ veracity.

I would love to hear what Bob Sutton thinks of these types of ‘evidence-based’ pronouncements masquerading as research.

The whole fraud is only possible because performance metrics in knowledge organizations are completely trivial to game. Joel on Software

Joel demonstrates a weakness of metrics in assessing the performance of software developers and somewhat cynically suggests that large management consulting firms actively exploit this weakness. Whenever I have a choice between malicious intent and incompetence I tend towards the latter as an explanation.  Personally I believe large consulting firms have these problems because they are steeped in particular mental models, namely the idea that organisations are machines and if you can’t measure it you can’t fix it. Fredrick Brooks understood this and painted a clear picture of the complexity of managing software development projects in his classic, The Mythical Man-Month.

So what is the weakness Joel uncovers? Companies want to improve performance (excellent objective) and consulting companies have methods to measure the current performance (it’s good to know where you stand). But here is the big mistake: the consulting company makes the measure of performance a target. And this is what happens:

Consulting company comes in, gets all the programmers in a room, tells them all about Function Points [the measure of performance] and stuff, and how productivity is REALLY IMPORTANT.

Programmers remember that scene from Office Space where Bob and Bob, the consultants, recommended all the people to get fired.

Programmers start writing a heck of a lot more function points. For example you can triple the number of function points in your code simply by round tripping everything through an XML file. Big waste of time, prone to bugs, does nothing, but each file you touch adds a function point. W00t!

Consulting company comes back, measures again, and lo and behold, with all the round trips through XML the function point count is up drastically. Consultant announces that Oil Company is now at 151.29% productivity. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

Here is an alternative approach.

• Work with the leaders to get a broad picture of what they think performance is in the context of software development. Get them to paint that broad picture while resisting the temptation to fill in all the gaps.
• Ask the software developers to define the performance measures and keep them to a minimum.
• Be clear what will remain measures and what will be the targets
• Add to the metrics approach a qualitative assessment of impact using Most Significant Change (see Zahmoo to learn about this technique).

This approach is based on the idea that any journey of change (actually I prefer the metaphor of the expedition) should be created three times. The first creation is in the minds of the leadership group (however you want to define that). The second creation of the journey is in the minds of the participants. Finally the journey is created for real as everyone sets off together and it’s here that everyone discovers that is never turns out the way they expected, so a willingness to monitor and adapt is essential.

[thanks to Les Posen for the pointer to Joel’s post]

One of the concepts of Appreciative Inquiry is to identify the positive deviants in a system and to find out what it is they are doing that works. The Positive Deviance Initiative has put this approach to the test in development projects since 2002. The concept is to identify the things/people that are successful in a system (the positive deviants), find out why they are successful and apply this learning broadly. The case study of ‘anti-girl trafficking’ in Indonesia provides a powerful example of how his approach can have stunning results.