| 1/05/08 | | Cooperation and the tragedy of the commons |
One of our regular commenters, ken, has directed me to an interesting article in the Washington Post equating Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton's race for the Democratic nomination to the classic tragedy of the commons scenario. That's when the individual actors operate to maximise their self interest and in the process ruin things for the wider group.
Here's how the tragedy of the commons (TOTC) scenario played out for a group of people playing the role of timber companies.
He asked volunteers to play the role of timber companies in a forest. The volunteers were told they could harvest a certain number of acres each year, and were also told how quickly the forest could replenish itself. The question was whether volunteers -- thinking on their own and without discussions with other volunteers -- would restrict themselves to taking less than half the timber that they were allowed. If everyone did this, the forest would replenish itself in perpetuity, creating the greatest wealth in the long term.
But because the volunteers did not know whether their kindness would be reciprocated by others or exploited by competitors, people raced to cut as much timber as they could and quickly razed the forests to the ground. Groups with volunteers more willing to think about the collective good preserved their forests longer. But selfish people within these groups had a field day exploiting the altruists -- and the forests perished anyway.
Unfortunately TOTCs are played out in organisations everyday, especially by managers who haven't worked out that their role is to help their staff succeed. And this problem is being exacerbated by the trend of people moving from one job to another and only sticking around for the short term. This is a problem because TOTCs are only avoided if people are working for the longer term.
the only way to prevent tragedies of the commons is to set up structures in advance that reward long-term thinking and punish short-term selfishness. This happens mostly among competitors who share long-term interests and have social relationships of trust (emphasis added): If you and I are Maine lobstermen, we are likely to agree to set up limits on the overall catch each year because we see our future, and our children's future, inextricably linked. In the absence of trust and long-term relationships, the only way to prevent these tragedies is to have an outside regulatory agency step in to establish -- and enforce -- limits.
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| 23/04/08 | | Workplace diversity |
Every month, the Australian Institute of Management publishes its magazine 'Management Today'. The back page (p56) of the May 2008 edition has some comments about diversity including the following anecdote:
"I had to ask for some time off for a family matter and I think my manager really resented it"
Compare this to an anecdote we recently collected from one of the companies we regularly work with:
"One of my fellow managers told me recently about one of their staff, their mother was in a unit that had flood damage and the mother was elderly and that person had to go and help the person strip out the carpets and do all the work. But she wanted a day off, so she had a day off. And then what happened was she needed to have more and more time off. My colleague said, look you need to sort out your family situation and we will sort out what you need to do with your work time. So as a result of that, that person got all the work done and then couple of weeks later did the extra hours, tied it all up, and got back on track. And that person who had the elderly mother in the unit was very much appreciated, that the flexibility was involved. That was very important to her. I felt good about that because there were no rules or guidelines but the manager made the decision and he got everything—the thing got done and everyone got a win-win situation out of it. It didn’t go to HR, he just organized it"
I know which organisation I would rather be part of. The article in Management Today states that effective diversity management means understanding and supporting both the obvious and less obvious aspects of our individual differences. Diversity is much more than a policy; it is an everyday activity that, if done well, can lead to more engaged staff and a positive impact on the bottom line.
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| 8/04/08 | | Footprints in time |
Chandni and I have just returned from the official launch of Footprints in Time, a
longitudinal study of indigenous children designed to identify the things that contribute to indigenous children growing up to be strong and resilient. The project has been four years in the gestation, and it was launched by Jenny Macklin, Minister for FaHCSIA and Professor Mick Dodson who is the chair of the project steering committee. This project is an enormous undertaking and high hopes are held for its ability to make a difference to the future policy responses to issues around indigenous children.
The project has two main streams; a quantitative survey and a narrative-based qualitative component. Anecdote has been working with the project for the past year supporting the narrative component and implementing the SenseMaker software developed by Cognitive Edge. It was exciting to be part of the official launch and it is great to be a part of such an initiative.
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| 17/03/08 | | How stories create culture |
It's said that stories create cultures; they propagate the assumptions and beliefs throughout the group in question. But it is specifically stories that create culture or is it something else?
Before we answer this question it's useful to have a definition of what we mean by 'a story'. Here's a definition I like from Annette Simmons latest book, Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins.
"Story is a reimagined experience narrated with enough detail and feeling to cause your listeners' imaginations to experience it as real."
Hearing a story is the second-best way to gain experience and in many cases it's the only available option. Sometimes it's too dangerous to gain first hand experience or the opportunity to gain first hand experience never presents itself. So the idea that a story is reimagined experience is important and useful. And the impact of a story is heightened the more real it seems.
So imagine the following:
A group of colleagues gather around a meeting room table. The meeting hasn't started and everyone is laughing and joking. Billy, a seasoned salesman, bursts into the room with a huge grin of his face.
"I've just come from the Sam Cook meeting [the CIO of a large government department]. They signed on the original price--they didn't screw us down. We will make out quota," Billy said. "And all we had to do was offer a service they were going to get anyway.... What they don't know wont kill them right?"
The group cheers while slapping Billy on the back in congratulations.
What just happened here?
Was it the story that created the culture? Did Billy's retelling of what happened with Sam create or reinforce the culture?
No, in this case the story is the trigger, but it's the response to the story that shows everyone how we behave around here.
This is an important point for leaders. Leaders must be poised to lead a response to stories told. To disrupt a response if necessary. For leaders this is about self awareness and being aware of the stories being told (which means being able to identify stories) and observing how people respond--and being ready and willing to intervene.
In a complex environment it's important to reinforce the behaviours you want and disrupt what's unfavourable and if you want to change the culture of a group, start by changing the response to the stories being told.
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| 22/01/08 | | Adding storytelling to the employee engagement agenda |
I was pleased to read the findings of a recent survey on employee engagement.
▪ 81% of organizations surveyed worldwide have an employee
engagement practice
▪ 49% use storytelling techniques to engage their employees
Although only a few organizations have employee engagement formally defined on their agenda, the survey suggests an increasing trend in the number of programs introduced over the past three years. It's great to see organizations sharpening the people focus to their business and using the power of narratives to assess their health. We have noticed that trend in our work too, with more organizations wanting to use stories to encourage the right leadership and knowledge–sharing behaviors. It’s strategic and becoming imperative.
If you’re thinking of ways to engage your employees using stories, here are two simple ways to get started:
1. Story wall – create spaces for employees to put up pictures of major team events or just their time at work. It helps to reinforce what’s good about the workplace and works as a great trigger for an interesting story.
2. Story booklet – run an anecdote circle with staff to collect stories about their most enjoyable time at work or things (events) that improved the way they work. You can then compile these stories into a storytelling booklet that you can share with new employees.
The most important thing is to start somewhere.
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| 24/09/07 | | Maister on Trust |
David Maister has an excellent podcast series. Some time ago I listened to his podcast on earning trust and the useful way he provides to talk about trust and its importance to business. The first point is that earning trust must be earned and deserved; it requires you to be 'truly trustworthy'. His construct was useful in a recent workshop where a client was exploring their vision statement to "be a trusted supplier of ..." as it helped them think specifically what it meant to be 'a trusted supplier'.
Maister identifies four dimensions to trust. The first three can cause trust to increase (if you get them right):
- Credibility - about words - I can trust what he says. This is about tangible, professional expertise.
- Reliability - about actions - I can trust her to do something. Are you dependable and behave in certain ways?
- Intimacy - about emotions - I feel comfortable discussing this with that person. This is about the ability to relate to people one to one. It is the dimension that people fail on most often - it has high consequences if we get it wrong. Many people think (wrongly) that being 'detached' is something to aspire to.
The fourth component, self orientation, reduces trust:
Self-Orientation - about motives - the extent to which we can trust that someone cares about certain things. This relates to the extent to which we can focus on the other person in the relationship rather than ourselves. Selfishness, self-consciousness, need to appear on top of things or to appear intelligent, a long to-do list that distracts us from focussing in the moment etc are all things that keep us focussed on ourselves rather than the other person.
Earning trust requires us to be good at all four dimensions. And, of course, it doesn't just relate to business.
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| 11/09/07 | | Rugby team uses narrative to develop winning culture |
On a recent flight to Sydney, I was flicking through the Virgin Blue in-flight magazine 'Voyeur' and came across an interesting article about the ABC-TV series South Side Story, a documentary on the turnaround of the South Sydney Rabbitohs - an organisation that has seen its fair share of turmoil in recent years. Here's a quote that particularly stood out ...
"The major challenge was how do we get people to think only about what they can achieve in the future, as opposed to what they have witnessed in the past? ... That's why we've been getting players to share their stories and to build an ethos between them."
This is an interesting real-world example of how an organisation is using narrative to transform their flagging team into a high-performance organisation. It'll be interesting to watch their progress and see if it translates into both on-field and off-field success.
| 9/09/07 | | How to make your workplace more storyable |
Story techniques are becoming popular but I do worry that people will become overly focussed on capturing stories with the hope that someone will search the story database in search of how to get things done. The other, and complimentary, approach is to create workplaces where it's natural to tell (and listen to) stories and therefore create spaces for constant knowledge flow.
Here are some ideas on how you might make your workplace more storyable.
- Do remarkable things. Stories are told when there is something worth telling a story about. And if there is very little to remark on that helps guide the organisation, then people will delve into the minutiae, the trivial, the professional pulp fiction
- Know how to ask story eliciting questions. Don't just ask for the facts. Ask “What happened?” “Tell me about a time when ...” “When was the last time ...”
- Eat together. We seem so busy these days. In many workplaces people don't even stop for lunch. Big mistake. The best stories, the most important stories are told over a meal.
- Tell stories. Someone has to start modelling the behaviour so why not start the trend yourself. But don't make it a big thing by saying things like, “I've got this great story to tell you ...” Just slide into examples and recount your experiences.
How storyable is your workplace?
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| 25/07/07 | | The fragility of trust |
A friend of mine is a lawyer, and a good one at that. Our families just spent a week together in Mossy Point on the New South Wales coast and, as you might expect, we told each other lots of stories helping everyone to catch up on one anothers’ lives.
Today my friend, I will call her Julie (not her real name) told an anecdote illustrating the fragility of trust. Julie's an expert in collaborative law and she was organising a group of 10 law firms to pay for an ad in the yellow pages. One of the firms contributing to the ad was run by someone Julie knew quite well but he was concerned Julie's law firm would have pride of place on the ad. To address this concern Julie suggested that she would draw the firm’s names out of a hat and whatever order they came out would be how they would be listed on the ad. That seemed pretty fair, she thought. The law firm owner was happy with that idea but he said to Julie, “but we need someone independent to draw the names out.” My friend was incensed and she said to me, “It was at this point I stopped really trusting the guy”.
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| 15/07/07 | | Blogging has a role in culture change |
Arjun Thomas has blogged a summary of a recent McKinsey Global Survey on 'How Businesses are using Web 2.0". The survey continues a theme that businesses are still shy about the use of blogs within the firewall, identifying a preference for tools supporting automation and networking.
In contrast, a report entitled 'The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0' describes how blogs are being used by members of Congress, governors, mayors and police and fire departments. It describes how the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) has established a 'secure, real time blog' to connect generals and warfighters' which recognises that:
“the military has a wonderful axiom called the chain of command ... but the chain of information is not the chain of command.... When al Qaeda can outmaneuver you using Yahoo, we’ve got something wrong here”.
The use of blogs within STRATCOM to combat the strangling of information flows caused by traditional hierarchies is described as 'proving to be nothing less than an enormous cultural change'. And, of course, it is not just the military that are strongly bureaucratised and hierarchical.
Many organisations recognise the need for 'cultural change' to become more agile and resilient in the 21st Century. At the same time, some (many?) organisations continue to see blogging as a risk (as the McKinsey report indicates), perhaps because of the loss of control of information flows that blogging implies. The STRATCOM experience reinforces one of my strongly held beliefs; you can only change culture by changing your behaviour. This creates new stories that are told and re-told in the organisation. if organisations want better information flows and to be more agile and resilient, embracing blogging within the firewall provides a powerful demonstration of changed communication behaviour that can contribute to the desired culture change.
Thanks to Nerida Hart via actKM for the link to the second report.
Technorati Tags: CultureChange
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| 16/06/07 | | The war for talent |
The anecdote below, told by a participant in a recent workshop, really made me stop and think. There are lots of lessons it, not least of which is that seemingly innocuous actions can have a big influence on a person's decision to join an organisation.
A friend of mine had applied for a fantasic new job. Everythng went well during the interview and selection process and the organisation sent her a letter of offer. She turned down the opportunity because the letter of offer was sent to her at 11pm on a Friday evening by the person who was to be her new manager.
It also reminds me of dedicated (workaholic) people I have known or worked for who put in long hours but have no expectation that their staff do the same, and tell them that. The only catch is that their behaviour has a lot more impact than their words...
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| 2/04/07 | | Trust requires a relationship |
A New York Times/CBS News poll from July 1999 revealed that 63% of people interviewed believe that in dealing with “most people” you “can’t be too careful” and 37% believed that “most people would try to take advantage of you if they got the chance”. If you assume that this is representative of the people you wish to influence, your first job is to let people see that you can be trusted. How? The same study gives us a hint. Respondents also revealed that of the people that they “know personally,” they would expect 85% of them to “try to be fair.” Hmmmmm. Could it be that simple? Let people see who you are, help them to feel like they know you personally, and your trust ratio automatically triples? Think about our language: “he’s okay, I know him” or “it’s not that I don’t trust her, I just don’t know her.”1
Our blogs regularly mention the issues of trust and relationships and their importance in the workplace (examples are here and here). The quote above reflects the importance of relationships and why people who are connectors and hubs in social networks are more effective: they have more relationships and more people ‘trust’ them.
1. Annette Simmons, The Story Factor, Basic Books 2006, page 7.
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| 28/01/07 | | Using small rituals to switch roles and behaviour |
Our behaviour changes with the roles we play, and sometimes we need a trigger to remind us to move from one role to another to ensure our behaviour suits the context. The TV series, The West Wing, provides many good examples of where this switch falters. For example, President Bartlett will have an intense meeting with his advisors, Josh and Toby, and then receive a surprise visit by one of his daughters. In most cases the President fails to make the switch from leader to father and deals with his daughters in an inappropriate presidential fashion.
Dave Snowden brought this concept of an identity switch to my attention last week when Mark and I spent the day together in Canberra. He told the story of a project he was involved in helping lorry drivers reduce back injuries. At the end of a trip, a lorry driver changed roles from ‘lorry driver’ to ‘lorry unloader’ and in this role switch many drivers don’t change their mind-set to remember safe lifting practices.To help the identity switch occur, Dave suggested the company introduce a ritual so that upon reaching the destination, and before unloading the truck, the driver must fasten a weight-lifting belt around his waist signifying the switch in roles from driver to unloader, and in the process helping him become aware of safe lifting practices.
We saw a similar identity switch occur for managers who need to switch roles from spreadsheet jockey to coach. For example, a manager might be working intensely on her computer when a staff member knocks at the door. A good manager can switch roles from being focussed on the computer to being focussed on the person. A useful ritual might be to stand up and move to another chair when someone arrives at your office, clearly signifying the change in roles.
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| 10/01/07 | | The power of ordinary practices |
An article titled ‘The power of ordinary practices’ was the seventh ‘most read’ of Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge articles for 2006. The articles includes the following:
I believe it's important for leaders to understand the power of ordinary practices. Seemingly ordinary, trivial, mundane, day-by-day things that leaders do and say can have an enormous impact. My guess is that a lot of leaders have very little sense of the impact that they have.
One of our projects has involved collecting about 250 anecdotes from within a large multinational on the theme ‘values in action’. The anecdotes were used as part of a management development program. After short-listing the anecdotes, teams went through the most significant change process to identify anecdotes that provided the best examples of behaviours they should model. The following anecdote was selected as the most significant by one of the teams.
A great example, you go and - even impromptu if you just knock on [name's] door if you've got something you want to talk to him he will get up and he will move to his table and he'll give you his undivided attention. I have experienced many other managers who will continue to type, will not always turn and look at you…
That something so innocuous has such impact reinforces the ‘impact of ordinary practices’. As we regularly comment – little things can make a big difference. But, you can tell managers this sort of thing a hundred (bazillion) times without it really sinking in. So, here we see some of the power of narrative – a simple anecdote has had a major impact upon a group of senior managers by giving them a powerful example of the effect their behaviour has on others.
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| 6/01/07 | | People don't leave organisations |
I was working with Tony High before Christmas when he made the point to the group that ‘people don’t leave organisations, they leave managers’. This is certainly consistent with my experience. Even if your job is fantastic, if your manager isn’t then thoughts inevitably turn to ‘what next’ and it’s a slippery slope once you start thinking about leaving an organisation. Conversely, I have endured lousy jobs because of a fantastic manager.
One of the areas that managers have a big effect is upon creativity and innovation. Teresa Amabile, in an article titled ‘The Power of Ordinary Practices’ in HBR’s Working Knowledge points out that if people are in a good mood on a given day, they're more likely to have creative ideas that day, as well as the next day. Below is an extract from the article:
The team leader's behavior is critical. I found that there are five leader behaviors that have a positive influence on people's feelings … One of these is supporting people emotionally. The second is monitoring people's work in a particularly positive way, and that has to do with giving them positive feedback on their work or giving them information that they need to do their work better. The third behavior is just plain recognizing people for good performance, particularly in public settings. The fourth is consulting with people on the team—that is, asking for their views, respecting their opinions, and acting on their needs and their wishes to the extent that it's possible. And the fifth category was a grab bag of things. But the most important aspect here was collaborating—that the team leader rolled up his or her sleeves and actually spent time collaborating with somebody on the work.
All this reinforces the importance of Bob Sutton’s ‘no asshole rule’.
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| 27/12/06 | | Why people do the things they do |
Christmas reading has help me stumble across two very different essays with the same theme: people are enormously influenced by their social ties. Anyone reading this blog won’t be surprised by that theme but these essays present two very different contexts. The first is called Knowing the Enemy by George Packer, which was recently published in the New Yorker. It’s a lengthy treatment on how social scientists are re-conceiving the way the US government might approach insurgencies. The “War on Terror” moniker has mislead policy makers and commanders in thinking primarily from an armaments and military force perspective. The essay suggests that in order to combat insurgencies we need information, influence and the ability to connect people in different ways.
The other essay is called Darwin on the Bounty: The How and the Why of the Greatest Mutiny in History by Michael Shermer. It’s a chapter in his book, Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown
What does this mean for organisations? Well I think one of the social scientists from Knowing the Enemy, Australian Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, said it best in his tips for company commanders (read, managers) about to be deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan:
Know your turf—Know the people, the topography, economy, history, religion and culture. Know every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader, and ancient grievance. Your task is to become the world expert on your district.
[thanks to Les Posen for the link to Knowing the Enemy]
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| 19/12/06 | | How people perceive one another - a short film |
I was at the Salesforce.com Christmas drinks a couple of weeks ago and as part of the entertainment we watched a few short films. All the films are available at www.niceshorts.com.au but there was one in particular I thought you might like because it illustrates how we build stories to understand people and how often we are wrong in our first assessment. The short film is called Cross Examination.
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| 2/12/06 | | Get your executives reading over Christmas |
Some of my best projects started from getting a group of executives to read books like The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
I recommend these four books because each one challenges traditional business thinking , they’re fun to read and they are the type of book someone might enjoy at the beach.
Happy reading.
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| 24/11/06 | | Anecdote circles are like dinner parties... |
We often describe anecdote circles as being a bit like dinner parties, with the exceptions that we try have just one conversation at a time, and there is no wine. Well, last night I facilitated an anecdote circle that was exactly like a diner party…
SMS Management and Technology, an Australian consulting company (that both Shawn and I worked for in a previous life), is holding a series of dinners to get new starters and account managers together so the new starters can share their experiences and background and the account managers can share stories around the values of the company. Last night was a fantastic experience. In ending the session I asked them to reflect on how they felt and there were three distinct themes. One was that participants felt privileged and humble for people to have shared their stories. Another was concern about a decline in the humanity in our organisations and how events such as last night were fantastic at providing a forum where people could connect at a meaningful level with each other. The third was that the event reinforced to the new starters that they had made a good career choice.
This is an example of how narrative approaches can be used in creative ways to restore dialogue and humanity in 21st Century organisations.
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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 | | Arthur Shelley's Organisational Zoo |
Metaphors are powerful for understanding what makes people really tick. Forget asking people what they think about a situation; ask them what comes to mind regarding how things really get done around here when you see these three characters?
Each character is from Arthur’s The Organizational Zoo
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| 2/11/06 | | Testing your company's ethics-sensitivity |
I was chatting to a HR Manager from a financial services firm this week and he told me this story about a workshop a management ethicist ran for their leaders. Over a week the ethicist collected stories from staff about how work gets done. Her aim was to create a convincing scenario that would be used in the workshop. During the workshop she read out the scenario and asked the participants to raise their hand when their gut instincts suggested there was something not quite right going on.
I would imagine everyone would be keeping an eye on one another to see who would break first. Public recognition of something going wrong is an important aspect of the exercise because that’s what it takes for someone to metaphorically raise their hand when they think there is a problem. Peer pressure is involved.
The discussion that followed was rich and intense. Exactly the sort of thing people need in any organisation. Builds intuition, or as blokes like to call it, gut instinct.
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| 26/10/06 | | The new science of change |
I enjoyed reading this article this morning on some of the neuroscience behind change and some of the practical approaches you might adopt armed with this knowledge. Here are the sections of the article with one or two sentences highlighting key ideas.
- A Universal Truth – brain science is giving us new insights into how and why people change (or resist it).
- Why Change is Painful – there is physical and psychological discomfort when we are faced with change. We get overwhelmed as the prefontal cortext is overworked—short term memory and where we perform our mental gymnastics. We fall back on our basal ganglia, which is our intellectual work horse. The patterns here are more fixed and resilient to change.
- Carrot and Stick: The Flaw – this approach is like training animals. Doesn’t have a long-term effect on the individual. It can have a system-wide effect, for example getting all entire sales force to increase the number of customers in South America.
- Not Your Change; Their Change – People hate being told what to do. It is better to show people examples and have them have their own epiphanies. This means painting a broad picture of the future and resist filling in all the gaps so there is room for people to envisage how the future might unfold.
- How Questions Provide Answers: A Case Studied – The article highlighted questions as a good way for people to engage in a idea. I was also say stories help enormously. Here’s a guide to collecting stories you might like.
- The Joy of Repetition – The insight or epiphany is merely the trigger. People need repetition of the idea for the new connections to be made.
- Not Your Motivation, Theirs – Learning is a big part of change. Learning programs need to be at the core of the change programme.
- The Hard Edge of the Soft Stuff – Be patient. Change takes time.
[via Stephanie West Allen]
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| 7/10/06 | | The people are the organisation |
It is the most ubiquitous platitude of corporate life: “People are our most important asset.” The undeniable reality, of course, is that the human side of enterprise remains the ultimate backwater. Be honest: How many companies do you know that are as creative, as disciplined, as businesslike about the people factor in business as they are about finance, engineering, marketing?
I came across this statement (and question) in the Maverick’s Manifesto circulated in the latest ChangeThis newsletter (which never fails to provide valuable insights). One of Anecdote’s motivations is to bring humanity back into our organisations and thus our methods are designed to help create the conditions to achieve this. There are many people we speak to about what we do who’s eyes glaze over when we mention topics like sensemaking, business narrative, storytelling, open space, communities of practice etc. There are also many, the early adopters, who’s eyes light up. They realise that they need to be able to answer the question ‘why would great people want to join the organisation’ and they understand that you don’t get happy customers from having unhappy, unfulfilled staff.
While I am often surprised at the number of managers I meet who just don’t get that ‘the people are the organisation’, we are fortunate that our work brings us into contact with organisations that are serious about the people factor. This reinforces our optimism that having fulfilling and humane organisations will eventually ‘go mainstream’.
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| 27/09/06 | | Surveys, rewards and shame |
Bob Sutton has a terrific post describing how Cedars-Sinai Medical Center got all their doctors to wash their hands. He main source for the post is a New York Times Magazine article called Selling Soap by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt.
The hospital started out with 65% compliance. [Now this percentage is thrown into question by some Australian research which showed that when doctors were asked, using a survey, whether they wash their hands, 73% said yes. When the researchers observed their behaviour they only detected 9% compliance. Here is another reason to be careful in using surveys to understand what’s happening in a social system.]
Back to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The first step they took was to reward anyone they saw washing their hands by handing out $10 Starbucks vouchers. This pushed compliance up to 85% but seemed to hit a ceiling.
They got the hospital up to nearly 100% by asking influential to place their hands in culture dish then photographing the bacteria and widely displaying the images, even putting one of the more disgusting as a screen saver for every computer in the hospital.
Both these examples are what I would call interventions. That is, a discrete, relatively small activities designed to change the system. It’s not a massive change program. It tackles one issue as a time and can make a huge difference. I think most large organisations get stuck into the mind-set of having to do the big programme—”we’re a big organisation, right!”
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| 22/09/06 | | Why you need to know about Anecdote Circles |
Interviews and surveys are no longer sufficient to find out what’s really happening in your business. Organisations are becoming more complex every day and as the number of connections increase understanding root causes becomes impossible. We need a way to make sense of the messiness we face. Interviews and surveys typically come laden with pre-determined thoughts of what the investigators might find and interviewees and survey respondents seem to fall into a mode of response based on what they think the inquirer is wanting to hear.
Stories reflect the messiness, reveal values and beliefs and when told in a group create an informal environment of exploration which invariably reveals insights one could never predict from the outset. Anecdote Circles is how we discover these stories. But that is not the whole story.
Anecdote circles are more than a story elicitation technique; they are an intervention in themselves. Some might say you shouldn’t start to run anecdote circles unless you are really serious about change. Once an anecdote circle process is started the change already begins.
Anecdote circles can be used as a process:
• To overcome the limitations of traditional interview and survey approaches
• For team and relationship building
• For lessons learning in project teams
• For conflict resolution
• To help collecting stories for evaluating intangible, difficult to evaluate projects
We will be releasing the ultimate guide to anecdote circles soon. Subscribers will be the first to receive it. Free!
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| 20/09/06 | | What are you more aware of - positive or negative stories? |
You may have been part of our Australian wide survey on attitudes and awareness of story and narrative approaches within organisations. One of the questions which we asked was for people to rate their awareness of positive and negative stories in organisational life.
Interestingly, the trend was that people rated that they were generally more aware of negative stories then positive ones with 24.1% of people saying they were aware to a considerable extent to positive stories, as opposed to 41.5% who claimed a similar awareness of negative stories.
I remember hearing Dave Snowden talk about the importance of negative stories and how they have served us. Evolutionarily speaking. The negative story gives us the opportunity to learn from someone’s experience. Often our own. He also mentioned that it is for this reason that negative stories will spread faster through an organisation than positive ones.
Something else which I find interesting about this trend is how powerful an approach like appreciative inquiry might be. If on the whole, most people are less aware of positive stories within their organisation than their negative counter parts, it seems to me that taking an Appreciative Inquiry, seeking out positive stories like those demonstrating “what it’s like when we’re at our best” could surely provide a break through way to how the organisation tackles ‘business as usual’. This may also be at the heart of the usefulness in being a positive deviant.
So, I wonder, what are you more aware of – positive or negative stories?
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| 6/09/06 | | Fun in the workplace |
The guys over at Signal vs Noise have it right. Fun is not at the other end of serious. You can have fun and be serious, creative, engaged, productive. Large companies are the worst offenders.
It’s a false choice, not a real fight. And you accept its premise at your own peril. Fun is all about creativity, innovation, play, experimentation, progress, and seeing real things come to life. If you make fun an enemy of business, you’re judging all these desirable concepts by association.
Having fake fun outlets won’t help either. Goofy Friday outfits or a monthly karaoke night are not a suitable substitutes for letting fun be a part of every day work.
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| 5/09/06 | | A craving for the human touch |
We’ve all had terrible experiences navigating through automated phone systems where you dial 2 for this and 3 for that only to have the system hang up on you. Apparently these systems are called phone trees. Well you can now bypass phone trees with a new online service called Bringo. Just select the company your want to call and someone will navigate the phone tree for you then call you back when they have a real live human being to talk to. Amazing! More evidence that when dealing with people you can’t aim for efficiency because we’ll create ways to circumvent the system. I’m also guessing that the call centre providing the service is based in India or China. Another indicator supporting Dan Pink’s thesis.
[via Freakonomics blog]
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| 1/09/06 | | The busy-ness meme |
Darren Woolley, over at P3, has also noticed the busy-ness meme. You know the one: we are so busy as the moment, flat out. In fact I’ve noticed that people are greeting each other differently these days. It goes something like this:
“Hi Bob, how’s it going?”
“Busy, very busy. Hardly got time to scratch.”
“Yeh, me too. Flat out.”
“Time for a coffee?”
“Sure thing.”
We all say we are busy. It’s almost a badge of honour. I wonder what would happen if you said, “I have a bit of free time at the moment. It’s just the way I like it.”
Anyway, Darren goes on list some things that are wrong with business meetings and gives us some ideas on how to get more out of meetings. Well worth a read.
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| 31/08/06 | | Why we are worried about global terrorism and not global warming |
Social psychologist, Dan Gilbert, says people will not get excited and worried about global warming in the same way people have about global terrorism because of the way our minds have evolved over millions of years. In his essay for The Times, Gilbert suggests 4 reasons for this disparity:
- Global warming does not represent people attacking us and we have evolved to be incredibility interested in people.
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Global warming doesn’t violate our moral sensibilities in the same way transgressing social taboos will. As Gilbert says: “And so we are outraged about every breach of protocol except Kyoto.”
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Global warming is a long term threat and we have evolved to detect clear and present dangers.
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Rate of climate change is too slow for people to really notice and therefore care.
You might be wondering why in a business blog I’m talking about climate change and terrorism. Well, these same factors, which render people apathetic to global warming, also affect people in organisations with issues like knowledge loss resulting from a retiring, aging workforce, how outsourcing and automation will require 1st world nations to focus on right brain capabilities, and how increasing connectivity among people will require a new worldview encompassing complexity principles.
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| 25/08/06 | | From little things big things grow |
I was writing a paper today describing our story-based approach to change and remembered Paul Kelly’s song, From Little Things Big Things Grow. I’d never read the lyrics before and found they sent a shiver up my spine. Paul tells the story of Lord Vestey (owner of a large cattle station) and Vincent Lingiarri (aboriginal leader) and the 8 year strike by Gurindji people for better conditions and for the return of their land.
There are some lines in the song particularly relevant to change management
Vestey man said I'll double your wages
Seven quid a week you'll have in your hand
Vincent said uhuh we're not talking about wages
We're sitting right here till we get our land
and this one
How power and privilege can not move a people
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| 19/08/06 | | IBM's Innovation Jam |
IBM seems to be taking its WorldJam technology to the streets and letting everyone take a look. Since IBM’s first Jam in 2001 (I was one of the 50,000 or so participants) they have regularly held these 72 hours collaborations on their intranet to tackle a range of issues. This is the first time, to my knowledge, that everyone (outside IBM) can see what’s going on. It’s starts on September 12 and it will be worth taking a look.
[Thanks to Nancy White for finding this one]
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| 4/08/06 | | Are organisations losing their humanity? |
For some time now we have wondered whether organisations may be starting to lose their humanity. Maybe its a good question whether they ever had it, but the “Time is money” metaphor predominant in business today seems to have a lot to answer for. Tick Tock. To busy to spend time in dialogue. To busy to explore, we need to know the outcome. “How are you today” – “Busy”. To busy. Time is money.
And then, what about the “no asshole” rule suggested recently by Harvard professor, Bob Sutton.
Don’t hire assholes regardless of their earning potential and if someone has developed into one, help them see the light or get rid of them.
Its interesting and ironic that things have gotten so bad that we need to become more mindful of assholes and asshole behaviour in organisations.
And all this is not without cost. Organisations should care. As Leon Gettler a senior business journalist and blogger at The Age has found:
Workplace bullying is estimated to cost Australian business in excess of $3 billion a year and employers could be liable under a stack of laws, including Occupational Health and Safety, discrimination and workers' compensation.
So, I wonder, are organisations losing their humanity? What do you think?
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| 1/08/06 | | Nouns kill the power of missions and values |
A tiny thought but potentially quite practical. Organisations have a mission, right? They have values. Dull, boring, lifeless. No one cares about the organisation’s stated mission or values; they probably don’t even know they exist.
What if an organisation was on a mission?
What if we valued things, actions, attitudes?
Sounds more exciting. Sounds like something you want to be a part of. You betcha.
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| 9/06/06 | | Neuroscientific look at change management |
Here is an interesting article which reports on a range of neuroscience research on how people respond to change. The article explores the following conclusions:
- Change is pain. Organizational change is unexpectedly difficult because it provokes sensations of physiological discomfort.
- Behaviorism doesn’t work. Change efforts based on incentive and threat (the carrot and the stick) rarely succeed in the long run.
- Humanism is overrated. In practice, the conventional empathic approach of connection and persuasion doesn’t sufficiently engage people.
- Focus is power. The act of paying attention creates chemical and physical changes in the brain.
- Expectation shapes reality. People’s preconceptions have a significant impact on what they perceive.
- Attention density shapes identity. Repeated, purposeful, and focused attention can lead to long-lasting personal evolution.
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| 30/05/06 | | What are knowledge behaviours? |
I’ve been asked by a client to propose a way to help embed knowledge behaviours. My approach will consist of creating situations where the organisation’s staff work things out for themselves and develop their own interventions (as is my way), but it did get me wondering what knowledge behaviours might be. Here are some I’d thought of. My list was prompted by some ideas in David De Long’s working paper of 1997. I would love to hear what you think knowledge behaviours are.
- sharing what you know
- helping someone to learn something
- having open and rigorous dialogue
- discussing and exploring assumptions
- speaking one’s mind respectfully
- seeing whether it has been done before and using what’s been done rather than creating something anew
- linking up with people outside my clique to see if they are doing something we can use
- taking time out to reflect on what’s happened and discussing this with my colleagues
- seeking out the best person to help me (this might not be the most expert but perhaps the most approachable and quite expert)
- trying to combine ideas from different fields
- recognising others for their intellectual effort
- forming teams to collaborate on a project
- willingness to share the kudos
- being trustworthy
- fostering trust (this is a biggy and would have many related behaviours)
- checking my trusted information sources
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| 14/05/06 | | Open letter to CXO's |
Pam Slim writes a refreshing and forthright post slamming common management practice. I particularly like her take on culture:
Corporate culture is a natural thing that cannot be manufactured. No amount of posters, incentive programs, PowerPoint presentations or slogans on websites will affect the hearts and minds of your employees. If you want to see things change immediately, stop acting like an asshole. If you see one of your senior managers acting like an asshole, ask him to stop. If he doesn't stop, fire him. You will be amazed at how fast the culture shifts.
This sentiment was also conveyed in Robert Sutton’s essay in Harvard Business Review where he advocated businesses implement a no asshole rule. Don’t hire assholes regardless of their earning potential and if someone has developed into one, help them see the light or get rid of them.
While I haven’t seen an intervention described in these forthright terms before it certainly meets our criteria of a small thing that can make a difference. Put another way; using simp