| 15/05/08 | | Lessons from Lewis & Clark—a new white paper is coming |
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.
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| 1/04/08 | | Jumpstart storytelling - creating the conditions for collaboration |
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.
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| 13/11/07 | | Three stories and an argument |
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.
| 5/11/07 | | Changing people's attitude toward change |
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 ☺
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| 12/09/07 | | Intelligence agencies adopting social software |
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.
“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
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| 24/07/07 | | Architectures of control |
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
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| 27/05/07 | | Staff induction - it's just learning |
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
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| 27/04/07 | | The story of the old man and the insulting children |
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.
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| 27/02/07 | | Redressing the balance in developing knowledge strategies |
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:
- the company engages consultants to analyse their needs
- 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.
- the consultants interview staff, conduct focus groups and compile an inventory of important knowledge assets
- gaps are identified between what currently occurs and what needs to happen to achieve the vision
- a report is written and there's considerable debate over the structure, format and wording of this document
- the knowledge strategy and associated implementation plan is presented to the executive group for their approval
- everyone is exhausted but pleased with the document
- 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.
- businesses are less predictable and long-term, linear plans rarely achieve their stated goals
- embedding actions in the day-to-day activities of the organisation allows new ways to tackle problems to emerge
- 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/.
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| 27/02/07 | | Don't tell me what to do, tell me a story |
Last week I returned from my morning walk to find my 11–year-old daughter filling the blender with ice cream to make a banana smoothie. My first reaction was to say, “What are you doing eating ice cream for breakfast? That’s a bad habit to get into. It’s unhealthy. You should stop having ice cream for breakfast” The response was a dismissive grunt in my general direction. Hmmm, that didn’t go well.
After we sat down to eat breakfast I started to tell my daughter a story. “When I was in high school my parents really had no idea about healthy eating and we used to drink soft drinks all the time, ate lots of bread and hardly touched fruit.” Then the phone rang and I answered. When I returned to the table my daughter said, “go on, you were talking about when you were in high school.” I continued the story which conveyed the message that the habits you form now will be with you for the rest of your life. I made no mention of the smoothie.
A week has gone by and ice cream hasn’t featured on our breakfast table.
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| 30/01/07 | | Defining intent in a change management program |
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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| 26/11/06 | | How a community can find the information it needs |
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.
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| 18/11/06 | | 4 ways to use your time more effectively |
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:
- Someone else sets your agenda and fills you schedule with tasks
- You don’t know what to say ‘no’ to
- We can do so many things these days, so we do
- We want to keep an eye on everything because the world is complex and changing and we are constantly distracted
- Our physical workspaces encourage distractions
- We are more connected than ever and technology keeps the channels open
- Being generalists we tackle new things over and over and never are really proficient
These suggestions will help you wrest control of you time.
- 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).
- 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)
- 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)
- 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]
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| 13/11/06 | | The lure of numbers--employee engagement is good for business |
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.
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| 13/11/06 | | Measuring knowledge work - when measures become targets |
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]