| 15/01/10 | | Creating more humanistic workplaces |
"If you go into a grey concrete box with one little window, it's claustrophobic, it's cold. If you put a skylight in it and you make the window bigger and put a tree outside and put wood on the floor, it gets better. And it can get better and better until it becomes a humanistic space to which our bodies respond, our emotions respond." Frank Gehry in Wisdom by Andrew Zuckerman.
We can do the same in our workplaces. Not just with the physical space but with how we work, interact, connect and get things done. Frank Gehry adds skylights, wood flooring and trees. We add stories.
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| 25/11/09 | | Rules are made to be ??? |
This morning, Shawn and I compared recent airline lounge experiences. Mine went a like this
On Monday morning I took my Mum to the airport for her flight back to Melbourne. We arrived at about 9.15 am - the airport was as quiet as I have seen it. We had 30 minutes before the flight and Mum wanted a cup of tea. "No worries" says I. "we'll nip into the Qantas Club for a cuppa". At the entry desk, I showed my gold club card and explained that I wasn't travelling that day, but wanted to come in to get Mum a cup of tea. "The rules say that if you're not travelling you can't come in" was the reply from the Qantas lady behind the desk. I asked if they were particularly busy at that time and the answer was 'No, but we have had to turn other people away so we can't let you in". I left. Furious.
Shawn's experience yesterday was very different.
Shawn took his daughter Georgia to the airport to collect a relative who was arriving. Georgia needed to go to the bathroom and Shawn noticed they were right next to the VirginBlue lounge. He went in, showed his card and explained. The response was "Its against the rules to use the lounge if you are not travelling, but its pretty quiet, so go ahead" They popped in for the necessary few minutes and left. Everyone was relieved.
One could argue that the Qantas staff member was being consistent (fair, equal) in her application of the rules. A good thing you might say, except that a very frequent traveller left with the resolve to travel VirginBlue in the future. In Shawn's case, the staff exercised some autonomy, weighed up the situation and decided to be flexible, whilst still making it clear that it was 'against the rules'. Which is the better example of customer service? It reminds me of my time in the Air Force where our mantra was "Rules are for the guidance of the wise and for the blind obedience of fools'.
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| 26/10/09 | | How can we work out our corporate values and help everyone know what they really mean? |
Most organisations I know have a set of stated values. You know what I mean, things like integrity, professionalism, respect for the individual. And in most cases they've been developed for the wrong reasons. And when developed for the right reasons, most employees don't understand what the values mean anyway. Let me explain.
Often the starting question for establishing a set of organisational values is, "Which values should we hold each and everyone accountable for so our organisation thrives?" This gets translated to "What values do our stakeholders (employees, customers, suppliers) expect us to hold?" The list is then drawn up and the result is a moribund list of words.
I was reading a paper by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras and they suggest an alternative set of questions (in my words): "What values do we deeply hold that reflect the essence of our company?" and "Would we still hold these values if they created a disadvantage for us if things changed?" If you can answer these two questions in the positive then you've identified your core values. What I found really interesting was looking at some examples Collins and Porras gave and noticed how each company held a different set in that the usual suspects weren't repeated: they didn't all have to value innovation, or customer service, or integrity. The lists I'm seeing are starting to look the same.
Sony
- Elevation of the Japanese culture and national status
- Being a pioneer - not following others; doing the impossible
- Encouraging individual ability and creativity
Merck
- Corporate social responsibility
- Unequivocal excellence in all aspects of the company
- Science-based innovation
- Honesty and integrity
- Profit, but profit from work that benefits humanity
Walt Disney
- No cynicism
- Nurturing and promulgation of "wholesome American values"
- Creativity, dreams, and imagination
- Fanatical attention to consistency and detail
- Preservation and control of the Disney magic
Collins and Porras' research shows that companies who have enduring values and a clear purpose out perform their competitors. But here's the thing, their core values are not chosen because they think they will be competitive advantages, rather they are chosen because they are held deeply by the core group. Art Kleiner, who wrote a terrific book on core group theory, makes the good point that "The organisation goes wherever its people perceive that the Core Group needs and wants to go. The organisation becomes whatever its people perceive and want to become." And this is double true for organisational values.
Values and meaning
When I worked at SMS (Australian consulting company) in the 90s we had three values: add value, maintain unity, enhance reputation. I knew what the 2nd and 3rd values meant but 'add value' was a bit fuzzy for me. Value fuzziness is a common problem. And you've probably guessed what I'm going to suggest as a way to provide meaning: that's right, STORIES.
Imagine if for every value everyone can tell one or more stories to illustrate what that values means. I often ask people to give me an example to illustrate a value and in many cases all I get is a very intense look of someone desperately trying to remember a story to tell. I've said it before but if a company values [insert value] then it should be teeming with [insert value] stories.
Tyco has worked this one out. Tyco is a global business involved in fire safety, security and manufacturing. A few years back they released a booklet called Doing the Right Thing: The Tyco Guide to Ethical Conduct . For each ethical guideline they included one or more stories that either illustrated what the ethical value means when it's working or what it looks liked when it is broken. For example, Tyco values safety and a healthy work environment and here are their stories of that value when it's broken.
Unsafe Behavior Related to Health, Safety, and Environmental Issues Looks Like …
To save money at his plant, Sam provides half the number of safety goggles as there are employees on the line and instructs them to share.
Piette, the plant operations manager, instructs her people to dump used machine oil on unused acreage at the back of the facility.
Al, the plant manager, allows the contractor responsible for the removal of organic waste material to dump it in a local lake.
At Anecdote we do a lot of work helping organisations find and tell the stories that illustrate their values and also help design systematic ways to embed those values throughout the consciousness of everyone in the organisation. It is only by working at this level of values and purpose can people make the best decision possible in a complex and dynamic environment. Rules don't cut it. And if we think about what really makes an organisation it's those thousands and thousands of decisions are made each and every day, each one guides by the values in action.
Collins, J.C. & Porras, J.I. 1996, 'Building Your Company's Vision', Harvard Business Review, vol. September-October, pp. 65-77.
Kleiner, A. 2003, Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success, Currency Doubleday, New York.
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| 14/08/09 | | Worthwhile work |
Is there a movement toward meaningful and worthwhile work? Are people increasingly interested in pursuing work that contributes to a more equitable, just, sustainable and inclusive world? Do people increasingly want work that makes the most of their talents? A job they are proud of?
Its certainly getting a push from Gen X and Gen Y concerns about sustainability and purpose, but the trend seems much broader. The rise of thinking in areas such as Appreciative Inquiry, social responsibility, positive psychology, workplace happiness and complexity together with a raft of applications for narrative (both storytelling and narrative insight / storylistening) are other indicators.
A sizeable UK study in January 2008 suggested that "over three quarters of working people in the UK are concerned that the job they do should be worthwhile and almost half hanker after a job that is more worthwhile than the one they have at the moment." The table below from this study shows how key aspects of worthwhile work vary across age groups.
Another indicator of the rise of worthwhile work is the emergence of organisations such as EthicalJobs that connects people who are looking for worthwhile work with employers who offer jobs that make a difference. I like that these guys promote their brand image like this..."our office runs on 100% Green Power, we drink 100% FairTrade tea and coffee, and we use only bikes, feet & public transport to get around" They recently published survey results suggesting that there is a movement towards worthwhile work with many people prepared to take a decent pay cut to get such jobs.
For me there is one other key aspect of worthwhile work - being valued. This is an area where managers have an incredible influence of the extent to which people consider their work as being worthwhile. Why do we have workplaces that cause my sister to start crying while we are cleaning up after dinner on Friday night when she explains how her boss treats her like dirt.
Managers need to be mindful that a key part of their role is to build engagement and to create more interactions like this one...
My brand new manager (a young up-and-comer) rang me on Friday afternoon as I was driving home. He said "I'm just ringing to let you know how much I value what you do. You regularly top the sales results and have been doing that for years. I wanted to make sure you knew that what you do is noticed and how much it is appreciated. Have a great weekend." I had to pull over to the side of the road. In the past eleven years, through three previous managers, no-one had ever said anything like that to me before. I started crying...
There is a trend toward worthwhile work. And there are huge advantages for all of us in accelerating and broadening its uptake.
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| 23/06/09 | | Publicsphere - Government 2.0 |
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.
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| 6/04/09 | | Difficult conversations |
At a recent leadership program we were talking about values and a participant related a recent experience: "Another manager gave one of her staff a real serve in front of the whole office. I was appalled, it set such a bad example. And one of our values is respect for the individual". When I asked what happened when he 'called' her on the behaviour, the reply was a blank look and "er, well, I didn't say anything".
According to Human Synergistics data, the number two style for Australian and New Zealand mangers is 'Avoidance' (number one is Oppositional - oppose ideas and be critical of others). So, imagine 10 million managers and workers in Australia avoiding having difficult conversations.
Avoiding difficult conversations like the example above has a huge downside when it comes to organisational values. If behaviour that contravenes your values is not 'called' then you are effectively condoning it. So, having difficult conversations is critical in bringing your values to life. A value is only a value if you do something when it is contravened.
When we work with organisations to improve their ability to have these difficult conversations we find a few gems, like "One of my fellow managers, who is also a friend, is very loud. She is a good person, and a good manager, but she just talked too loud. I wanted to talk to her about it but I knew she wouldn't take it well. But I had to do it. And you know, she took it really well, was grateful for the feedback. It really surprised me".
A key behaviour we encourage groups to adopt to make these conversations possible is 'Call me on it...respectfully and with good intent'. Would your organisation be a better place if these difficult conversations were the norm rather than the exception?
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| 18/03/09 | | A leader's role to trigger stories |
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.
Meeting rooms are always at a premium in large organisations and NAB, at their beautifully designed Docklands headquarters, is no exception. Until Cameron's intervention there were meeting rooms set aside only to be booked by general managers. That's no longer the case. Anyone from the rookie analyst to the CEO has the same rights in booking and using any meeting room in the building.
The second change involves the CEO's lodgings. The previous head honcho and his staffers resided in an office referred to as the bubble. There were two levels of security to gain access to this space and the CEO would catch the elevator from the car park to bubble without having to venture through the rest of the building. Cameron is dismantling the bubble and is relocating his office next to the internal cafe, without any special refurbishment to his new space. You can't miss the dismantling as it affects half the foyer. A pretty clear symbol of change.
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.
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| 28/11/08 | | Collaboration requires fairness |
Humans have a strong sense of fairness. If two people are given a sum of money and one is asked to divide it and offer the other portion to their partner, if it's not a 50/50 split the partner is most likely to refuse offer, even if this means that both parties loose everything. And of course when it's hard to really to split something exactly down the middle (like a piece of chocolate forest cake) then the you-cut-I-choose method is the only fair approach. Interestingly if a computer makes the split people are most likely to accept whatever proportion that's offered. We don't expect computers to be fair. So don't fall for the lame excuse of, "the computer says no." They're just playing with your psychological foibles.
This sense of fairness has a strong bearing on how we rate our satisfaction with our collaborators, and therefore the collaboration's long-term success. We care more about the process of fairness than the outcome. In one study of car dealers and their relationship with the car manufacturer, the biggest factors in satisfaction were not the transactional details of inventory quality or how good a deal they were getting but how the manufacturer behaved towards the dealer. Did they take the time to learn about their unique operation and market, were they treated with respect, were they polite and well mannered?
Small things can make a big difference. In the middle of this year we started a project for a client and like for all of our clients we offer a 10% discount if the full amount is paid before we start (it usually happens about the same time as we start). This client took advantage of this discount but somewhere along the way our invoice was lost in their system and we were a month into the project without payment. I mentioned this to our client and he was embarrassed and immediately offered to pay the additional 10% because his company didn't fulfil their end of the bargain. Immediately our rapport was strengthened.
Treating everyone fairly is not just the right thing to do, it will determine the long-term success of your collaboration.
I was reminded of the money splitting experiment this morning reading Sway: The Irresistable Pull of Irrational Behaviour. They also tell the car dealer story. It's an excellent little book. Here are the papers describing the research.
Guth, W., R. Schmittberger, et al. (1982). "An Experimental Analysis of Ultimatum Bargaining." Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 3: 367-88.
Kumar, N., L. Scheer, et al. (1995). "The Effects of Supplier Fairness on Vulnerable Resellers." Journal of Marketing Research 32: 54-65.
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| 12/11/08 | | Metaphors everywhere |
A couple of years ago I spoke at a BHP Billiton planning day. My talk was at the end of the day so I sat up the back and listened to all the other speakers. While listening I was struck by the language the BHP Billiton people used: "we need to turbo charge the process, turn the cogs, grease the wheels, dig deeper ..." The dominant metaphor was that of a machine. I mentioned this to them in my talk and made the point that organisations can become trapped by the metaphors they use. If you view your organisation and its issues as a machine you will only devise machine-based responses.
After this experience I kept a keen ear out for dominant metaphors in other companies and discovered a bunch of examples: an investment bank where gambling was the major metaphor: let's roll the dice, we came up trumps, what are the odds ...; a road traffic authority that, you guessed it, uses road metaphors: we've got a green light, this is just one way traffic, we have a clear road map ...
Are you aware of the dominant metaphor in play at your organisation?
To help you get started identifying metaphors, Gabe Mounce has written an article called Metaphors are Mindfunnels with a couple of colleagues in the US Airforce. It reviews George Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By
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| 7/11/08 | | Creating a culture where people have conversations |
Many (most?) of our conversations in the workplace are transactional: in fact they are not conversations at all. In the October issue of Anecdotally, we shared a technique to encourage people to have conversations.
Here's a nice success story about how a culture was created where people have conversations.
"The London office was horrible", a senior manager told us, "with constant backbiting and a lot of bad blood''. The change started with Charlotte Beers, the then CEO of OgilvyOne, who invited all the business leaders to a two-day off-site meeting. Breaking with norms, she began the conversation by asking direct questions: "How do we feel about one another? Why can't we work together? Do we recognise what that is doing to our clients?'' That meeting was the turning point. Initially, the discussions were very difficult. "We simply did not know how to openly talk to each other", the same senior manager told us. "We were so used to being defensive and polite. It took two years and eight meetings - and some changes in the cast of characters - before we learnt to deal with emotions and feelings, to be authentic. Its only through that process that we learnt the power of friendship".
Gratton L., and Ghoshal S., (2002) "Improving the Quality of Conversations", Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 31, No. 3, pp. 209-223.
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| 2/11/08 | | Generation WE |
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| 23/10/08 | | One simple behaviour to improve collaboration |
From talking with people who are trying to improve their collaboration capability, I'm detecting a scepticism with the practice of getting your team or community together to decide, up front, how they will behave and treat each other. The feeling seems to be, "we can spend time talking about our agreed behaviours but then something else emerges that our agreement didn't really cover, so it's a bit of a waste of time."
So, how about this? Teams and communities only agree one behaviour that becomes the catalyst for nudging
Call Me on It (respectfully and with good intent)
Whenever a person does something other members believe strays from the group's values, members will talk about it and in doing so enables the group's values in action to emerge and become visible.
For this to work everyone will need to develop the skill to receive, which in some cases will be sensitive, feedback. Most importantly, the person receiving the feedback must listen and not let their emotions send them into a typical flight or fight tailspin. This will be a crucial conversation
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| 18/08/08 | | In defence of gossip |
Gossip is badly maligned in business, but that's because most of us only have a limited understanding of the concept. For example, gossip is merely anything we say about someone when they are not there to hear it. And it turns out we spend 65% of our talking time recounting who has done what to whom—gossiping. Business leaders will be pleased to hear that only a small percentage of this time (about 5%) is focussed on maligning our colleagues. So what are we doing in the other 95% and why should we care?
Robin Dunbar, the evolutionary biologist best known for Dunbar's number of 150, which is the maximum number of people we can get our minds around in a social network, argues that this substantial gossip time is akin to primates grooming each building their social bonds. Primates do it with their hands, humans groom each other with language. Does this sort of exchange sound familiar?
"Did ya hear about Marcus smashing his quota a month before quarter end? How does he do it?" said Amy.
"He's a freak. I hear he's big on lead generation and knows the marketing guys really well. Last week I saw him over there with chocolates. He's pretty friendly with Fiona. By the way are you going to Friday drinks?" said Pete.
Well, this is the type of thing we spend about 65% of our talking time saying. Interestingly Dunbar and his colleagues note that both men and woman spent the same timing gossiping and talked about similar things (experiences and relationships) with two exceptions:
- When men were with woman, men gossiped less (less about who did what with whom) yet spoke more. Men became more authoritative, factual and attempted to be more entertaining.
- Woman spend 2/3rds or the time talking about other people's social experiences whereas men spend 2/3rds of the time talking about their own experiences
Dunbar puts these differences down to our evolutionary needs for men to impress woman to find a mate and for woman to be good at building social networks to support the raising of children. Our evolutionary development, of course, is way behind our social situations in the 21st century, but it stills affects how we behave.
Finally we should be aware that most gossip is in the form of storytelling. It's people recounting events. It's not what I call big 'S' storytelling (well crafted plots, legends, fairy-tales) but the type of storytelling we are involved in much of our talking hours. This type of small, almost invisible storytelling has the greatest impact on who we are, how people view us (our reputation) and how we see this world.
Dunbar, R. (1996). Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press.
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| 6/08/08 | | Imbuing your workplace with stories |
A company that values customer service should be teeming with customer service stories. But what do you do if this is not the case? The Ritz-Carlton has developed a narrative-based approach for ensuring customer service is in the minds of all their people. It was described in this Business Week article but I first discovered it reading Maxwell and Dickman's The Elements of Persuasion. This is what the Ritz-Carlton has done.
Everyone in the company is encouraged to submit stories of RC people going above and beyond. Each week a story is selected and sent out to all the RC hotels around the world and this story is read out at the Line Up meetings, the gathering of staff before starting a shift. Here's an example of one of these stories as told by Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman, which RC call their WOW stories.
Like a lot of good stories, it starts on a dark and windy night. In this case, a blustery February when the downstairs bar that Fran tends was largely deserted. "The only one in the room was an older gentlemen, the sort of executive that has been drinking the same scotch for the last fifty years." A young, good-looking couple--we'll call them Dick and Jane-- came in dressed in laua shirts despite the weather and ordered mai tais. They seemed a little morose, but Fran is the sort of bartender who can get anyone to open up, and soon they told their story. Dick and Jane had just been married. They had always planned to honeymoon at the Ritz-Carlton in Kapalua, Hawaii. In fact, they had a reservation already booked for six months in the future, but Dick had just been diagnosed with cancer--a particularly nasty form of Hodgkin's lymphoma--so they pushed the date forward and were in L.A. for chemotherapy. This might be as close to Hawaii as they ever got, so they were bravely trying to make the most of it. When Fran tells the story, at this point her eyes take on that slightly stunned look that comes to cancer patients as they struggle to find the right balance between hope and denial. Obviously, the couple's story touched her deeply.
Fran got someone to cover the bar and sprang into action. She found Don Quimby, the manager on duty and together they went to the banquet hall prop room and collected anything that reminded them of Hawaii--a fishing net, a collection of starfish and seashells, a poster of Hawaiian hula dancers at a luau--and quickly gave the couple's room a make over. They even filled a cooler with sand and stuck in a sign that read "Dick and Jane's Private Beach." Then Don found an electronic key from the Ritz at Kapalua that a previous guest had left behind by mistake and reprogrammed it so it worked on Dick and Jane's room door. Don put on a Hawaiian shirt and went out to deliver this new key to them. He led them to their "new Hawaiian Honeymoon Suite," where a complimentary bottle of Champaign was waiting. And for the next three days staff of the hotel did everything it could think of to make the couple feel like they were on a Hawaiian honeymoon of a lifetime.
Three times a week staff recount WOW stories in the Line Ups, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Each time a WOW story is told it triggers a conversation about what everyone sees as significant in the story and often prompts the retelling of other stories of things that have happened in their own hotel. So rather than receive a corporate directive on how to behave staff vicariously experience behaviour that everyone recognises as exemplary.
You receive a $100 if your story is selected and at the end of the year there is a competition to select the top 10 stories.
This approach has many of the features of Most Significant Change except that the conversation around the stories happens at the coal face rather than among the decision makers. Mind you, someone in HQ is selecting the stories and this process could be expanded to include a MSC style selection process with the decision makers.
If done well your organisation would definitely be teeming with values in action stories.
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| 24/07/08 | | Trust creating behaviours |
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.
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| 5/07/08 | | The pond metaphor |
Here is something I have meant to post about for a while. It is a metaphor in the book 'Dangerous Undertaking' by James Harlow Brown. Shawn has previously blogged about the extensive use of metaphor in the book. The metaphor is in a story about a NASA engineer who discovered something that took him off his 'autopilot' and helped him realised the impact his behaviour and actions have. I have tried to paraphrase the story to capture its essence:
The engineer was sitting by a pond, contemplating. He saw a frog jump into the pond and noticed how the ripples spread right across the pond. He watched intently and realised that there were many other sources of movement on the surface of the pond. Insects would occasionally touch the water causing tiny ripples. A swallow swooped down and lightly touched the surface as it caught a bug. A light breeze came up and created more ripples. All these ripples interacted and caused complex patterns on the surface of the water. The engineer began to get an insight; each event was writing its unique pattern on the water and the ripples lasted long after the event happened. He realised that the whole world was the same way. We make ripples and create the future every moment.
The engineer's insight deepened. He realised he was watching the pond from a distance, as if he were outside watching others make ripples and he couldn't see himself in the picture. Suddenly it hit him that in the real world, there is no bank to sit on. He was right in the pond where the ripples were affecting him, and where he was causing ripples too. This was the insight that had a profound effect on the engineer, getting him to turn off his autopilot. Seeing himself as a part of the pond, not as some external observer.
For me, the pond metaphor has relevance to our work in leadership development. Some managers see themselves as sitting on the bank, carefully choosing where they want to drop a pebble and create patterns. They do so without realising that their every action creates patterns that have a big influence on the pond. Influences that may counteract the effects of their carefully dropped pebbles. 'Sitting on the bank' is a luxury that doesn't exist. We are all creating patterns, and the future, constantly because we are in the pond. Seeing ourselves as 'in the pond' helps change the way we think about the effects of our behaviour.
What ripples are you causing? Will your pebble drop with scarely a ripple in the pond, or will it have lasting effect?
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| 15/06/08 | | Internal blogging builds trust in leadership |
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?
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| 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 fantastic new job. Everything 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 simple rules. And frankly, life’s too short to deal with arseholes (Australian spelling).
Here are the 10 points Pam makes. For each point she provides a paragraph.
- Don't spend millions of dollars to try and change your culture.
- Stop running your company like the mafia
- Spend a moment walking around the halls of your company and look at your employees
- Teach people how to get rich like you
- Don't ask for your employees' input if you are not going to listen to it
- Don't train people until you know what problem you are solving
- Ditch the PowerPoint when you have town hall meetings
- Focus on the work people do, not how or when they do it
- Watch the burnout
- Forbid people to work while they are on vacation
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| 8/01/06 | | Describing your company values |
In 2004 I helped a large bank conduct a narrative project to examine trust in a call centre. They had just finished working on their corporate vision and values a few months earlier. Their list of values included the usual suspects: integrity, professionalism, respect. What I found interesting was that when we collected the anecdotes there was repeated, explicit and verbatim inclusion of only one of the values in the stories they told about themselves: tell it like it is, no spin.
This colloquially-worded value had established itself as a successful meme and was often extolled during meetings when someone was obviously pussy-footing around a topic—“tell it like it is, no spin” they demanded. I don’t think we heard explicitly about any of their other corporate values.
Tell it like it is, no spin resonated. Everyone knew what it meant. It was in their language—it was how they spoke.
In my experience working in and with large corporations and government agencies, most value statements are impossible to recall and totally forgettable. I think the most forgettable values are those that consist solely of a list of single words. For example, here is a set from one of the government departments in my home town:
- Leadership
- Integrity
- Collaboration
- Innovation
A single word followed by a description is a minor improvement but based on my experience at the bank I would say phrases, especially memorable ones, make good value statements. GE used phrases. Some are more memorable than others.
- Have a Passion for Excellence and Hate Bureaucracy
- Are Open to Ideas from Anywhere... and Committed to Work-Out
- Live Quality... and Drive Cost and Speed for Competitive Advantage
- Have the Self-Confidence to Involve Everyone and Behave in a Boundaryless Fashion
- Create a Clear, Simple, Reality-Based Vision... and Communicate It to All Constituencies
- Have Enormous Energy and the Ability to Energize Others
- Stretch... Set Aggressive Goals... Reward Progress... Yet Understand Accountability and Commitment
- See Change as Opportunity... Not Threat
- Have Global Brains... and Build Diverse and Global Teams
From this list a couple of phrases stand out for me: ‘have global brains,’ ‘live quality,’ ‘have enormous energy.’ It would be interesting to know which ones resonated most with GE staff.
But I think there is another element which could add significantly: for each value include an anecdote illustrating the value in action.
This illustrative anecdote should be immediately recognisable as something which happens in the organisation. It mustn’t be concocted reflecting an ideal. Rather, it should be collected from people’s experience. There could also be benefit from including an anecdote that’s the antithesis of the value. An antithetical anecdote, however, is much harder to include because the perpetrators could be vilified.
The selection of the illustrative anecdotes could also be a way to include the entire organisation in bringing the values alive and help them learn about and remember the new values. A web-site could be built for people to vote on the anecdotes which they think best illustrates each value. The collective wisdom of the organisation is then brought to bear on the final outcome.