| 15/05/08 | | Lessons from Lewis & Clark—a new white paper is coming |
David Drake and I have written a new white paper describing a narrative approach to successful organisational change. We've built on our three journeys metaphor, which you might remember was inspired by the epic exploration of the the US West by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Apart from describing the three journeys we've drawn a set of lessons from the Corps of Discovery (the nickname for the expedition) for each of our three journeys. Here are the lessons from our first journey:
- It is important to be clear on sharing the rewards before there are any.
- Travelling requires both authority and freedom/permission.
- Change requires an organisation to venture into unknown territory; it is as much about discovery as it is about design.
- Every change process has its “St. Louis”—a jumping off point into the unknown, a hub for action, and a platform to which one can return.
- Often the landscape changes merely as a result of setting out on the journey.
If you'd like to early notification and the ability to get this paper before we publish it more widely, please sign up for our monthly newsletter. In the next few days I will share the lessons for the second and third journey.
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| 13/04/08 | | 2020 Summit |
Andrew Leigh went to the 2020 summit warm up yesterday in Canberra. It was the ACT 2020 summit and the lesson he will be taking to the big event on the 19-20th this month is, "... any idea with less than 90% support on Day 1 is going to get killed." I can just imagine it, 300 people clamouring for their big ideas to be heard by 299 others and only 16 ideas making it to the end of the day. This is idea decimation in the original Roman sense of the word.
How did the successful ideas emerge? Were these successful ideas merely part of the community zeitgeist and would have survived regardless of what the participants did? How many were presented as a list of facts, a presentation of the evidence? I would be willing to bet many of the successful ideas were presented as a story illustrating the idea in a way that helped it stick in the minds of the participants. Once the idea took hold, it grew.
I worry about the upcoming 2020 summit. I want it to be a tremendous success but I can see 10 groups of 100 egos clashing and the largest voices smothering the quieter best and brightest. The success will depend on two factors: how the event is facilitated; and whether participants can tell stories to engage their fellow summiteers.
Facilitation, techniques and physical space
From what I can tell the summit organisers plan to run small group sessions and large plenary presentations. The warning bells should sound if we see rooms arrange in seminar seating styles, the favoured arrangement for one-way information transmission. I'm hopeful that the organisers know about techniques like open space, world cafe, or even something like jump-start storytelling to help the group be more collaborative. But maybe my hope is misplaced. These techniques foster real dialogue when in fact these two days will be a gladiatorial contest of whose ideas win. Physical space and technique are important but both are trumped by the skill and attitude of the facilitators. At one end of the spectrum is the facilitator who already has in their mind a picture of what good looks like and regardless of what's been said this person hears their version and heads the group in that direction. At the other end of the spectrum is the facilitator who is totally focussed on process and helps people be heard. I'm hoping the 2020 team of facilitators fits in this last category.
Storytelling
Each participant will have very little time to engage the group in their idea. Cognitive science show that if someone has a strong opinion on a topic and you provide an alternative opinion, it only serves to reinforce the person's original strong opinion. It's called a cognitive bias.1 However if we tell a negative story to grab attention then a positive story to illustrate what's possible, we have a much greater chance of changing someone's mind and engaging people.2,3 It's only after hearing the stories are people open to hearing the reasoning and evidence.
There are three reasons why these stories work:
- stories are memorable and can be retold. This is powerful if your story embodies your big idea and is the told and retold at the Summit.
- stories convey emotion and, regardless of what all the hard-headed rationalists would have you think, we make decisions based on the emotions we feel
- stories provide context and therefore are more meaningful than disembodied facts and figures. Of course some of the best stories are laden with facts and figures.
Summiteers need to find their negative and positive stories this week and resist the urge to start with facts followed by examples and flip their sequence starting with the stories followed by reasoning. The people who can will increase their chances to be heard and understood. And perhaps more importantly telling stories will help relationships form among this elite group and hopefully is followed by collaborations that will make a difference to Australia.
Kevin Rudd understands the value of story. We have seen it in his election campaign and on Sorry Day. And on reading some of the background papers for the Summit I found this warning:
"These background materials aim to tell an evidence-based story about how Australia is faring. They are not intended to be definitive or comprehensive, but were put together to stimulate discussion on the main challenges and opportunities facing the country and the choices to be made in addressing them. They do not representgovernment policy."
The summit organisers understand the power of stories. Now it's time for the participants to embrace this big idea.
Why not join one of our storytelling for leaders workshops.
1. D. Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007).
2. S. Denning, The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative (San Francisco: John Wiley & Son, 2007).
3. H. Gardner, Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004).
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| 10/04/08 | | An expansion of People, Process and Technology |
"We have to consider people, process and technology." It's a phrase I hear quite often, especially among IT folk. Sometimes they say, "people, process, technology and content." These are the things to consider when implementing a system. There are a myriad of variations. Yesterday I was told by an experienced consultant that they always consider policy when thinking about process. "People, process and technology" has entered our business thinking much like proverbs such as "a stitch in time saves nine." They create the framework for our thinking and both guide and constrain our actions.
I'd like to focus on the Process element of this business proverb and would like to suggest that this word creates a limited and inadequate response when thinking about what happens to make a system work. The word 'process' suggests all those things you can describe and write down, especially using boxes and arrows. Yet we know professional practice and even expert craft is required to get things done. So here is my suggestion. When we use the PPT (all business proverbs should have an acronym—my little joke) let's expand 'Process' and include Practice and Craft. Here is a short-hand way of thinking about it.
- Process is what you are told to do
- Practice is what everyone does
- Craft is striving for utmost quality with years of experience under your belt
And the ways to understand these three modes also differs but it's hard to categorise except to say that many processes can be analysed, many practices can be observed and illustrated with stories and craft can be observed, experienced and appreciated but takes years to learn.
I'm certain better systems will emerge if we take this wider view of process.
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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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| 28/02/08 | | Meeting to talk about storytelling, narrative and complexity |
I run a meetup group in Melbourne call Emergence and we get together for drinks and dinner each month. Our next meeting is on the 13th March at 6pm. For full details and to RSVP go to here. It very informal and just a good way to catch up with new people and talk about things that interest us. Everyone is welcome.
| 22/01/08 | | The role of a story in lessons learning |
Chris Collison is pondering the usefulness of the Kolb learning cycle as the basis for many of the lessons learning activities organisations conduct. I agree with Chris' observation that most organisations don't build in reflection and therefore are unable to reformulate what they have learned to change behaviour. And like Chris I'm not sure of the effectiveness of write-ups to achieve this last point. In fact I think we create our abstract conceptualisations (Kolb's language) by telling ourselves and others a story of what happen. Ironically the abstract comes from the specific of a story. Something like this happened to me just last week.
I got a friendly email from someone who has been a long-time subscriber to our newsletter. After mentioning that she had gained many useful tips and ideas from it she went on to say that she had only just realised we provided consulting services. I was nearly knocked off my chair—were we that poor at telling people what we do?. So I rang Mark and told him the story. He was gobsmacked. We obviously weren't letting people know in our newsletter we provided consulting services. What shall we do? Our first idea was to put a line at the top of our newsletter that said, in effect, 'we provide consulting services.' Actually we wordsmithed it a bit more than that. Then I called up our graphic designer, Kerenza, and told her the story and shared our plan for the oneliner. 'Ahhrg, that oneliner is awful,' she said. 'Before you were sending useful tips and information to me, now you are selling to me.' It was immediately clear that the one-liner approach was wrong and Kerenza and I came up with a new way forward.
So on reflection it was the story of the original email, told a number of times to different people that created new conversations that helped me learn about our brand, how we communicate to our newsletter subscribers and how we keep what we do authentic, fun and useful. And it changed my behaviour. To me, that's learning.
[thanks to Patrick Lambe for putting me on to Chris' post]
| 17/01/08 | | Storytelling, Business Narrative and Community of Practice Workshops |
2008 marks a busy year for Anecdote and this graphic gives you an idea of our workshop schedule. Storytelling is represented with bears, business narrative with fish and communities of practice with balloons. As you can see we are running workshops in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Perth. Here is the full, printable version of the schedule you can download and put on your wall. Alternatively, pop over to our workshops page and register your interest in attending via the web.
By the way, we can also run these workshops internally within your organisation.
| 11/01/08 | | Using a story spine for a reflection activity |
During a workshop I was recently involved in, I introduced the story spine to a couple of participants to help them to tell a story using the simple framework.
Not only did they embrace it enthusiastically and use it to great effect, unexpectedly the framework was adapted for a different purpose. A small group of onlookers decided to use it as the basis of a reflection activity. They did a great job, and I think it worked really well.
Here's a quick summary of how it might work for you:
- All participants of the group sit in a large circle
- The facilitator asks participants to reflect on an activity (in our case, we were reflecting on our involvement in a year-long training course)
- The facilitator begins by reading out the first part of the story spine, 'Once upon a time...' or 'Way back when ...'
- The person to the left of the facilitator is then asked--without rehearsal or preparation--to develop the story further by providing a brief sentence or sound-byte
- This continues around the circle with each person adding to the story until the facilitator feels that it's time to intervene with additional structure from the story spine. When they feel it is time the facilitator will add the next line i.e. 'Everyday...'
- This goes on until the story (as defined by the structure) is complete.
I recommend that you record the story so that you have an artefact or keepsake, or for transcription purposes. Because of the impromptu nature of the activity this was a bit of an after-thought for us. We did try to record the story using a mobile phone, but I'm not sure that it worked very well. I haven't heard anything!
The 'story' that we ended up with didn't make too much sense in the end, but that is unimportant. What is important is that the improvisations made it a lot of fun, and it also elicited lots of memories and anecdotes. It was also nice to reflect back on our shared experiences and to make sense of what happened as a group, as a collaborative activity.
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| 20/11/07 | | Keynote speaking - organisational storytelling |
Mark and I love speaking to audiences of all shapes and sizes and we have had the privilege over the years to give seminars and workshops to large and small groups. Our clients seem to enjoy our talks (sometimes they are more like workshops) and report significant impacts as a result of our presentations and follow up coaching. Recently I have been enjoying presenting on how we are helping leaders to be more memorable and persausive using organisatonal storytelling techniques.
So we've set up a page on our website describing some of the speaking topics we are delivering to our clients.
Here are a couple of quotes from our clients from recent speaking engagements.
The Churchill Club promotes entrepreneurial conversations without the hype and Shawn delivered that in spades at our recent session on business storytelling. He's tremendously engaging, has deep knowledge and passion for business narrative and can connect the dots between an esoteric subject and tangible business outcomes. Brendan Lewis, Executive Director, The Churchill Club.
Shawn’s presentation to our technical sales forum was right on the money. The story telling tactics and skills passed on have been immediately adopted, and are producing higher quality presentations by our team to our clients. We look forward to continuing to develop our skills in this area, which will support the business objectives of our organisation and our customers. Senior Manager, IBM Australia.
| 12/11/07 | | Business Narrative Workshop - 3 December |
Over the years we have refined our one-day Narrative Techniques for Business workshop and have it to the point we are proud of both the workshop content and the materials we provide for participants. Our emphasis is on the practical application of business narrative techniques and our extensive project experience is used to bring the issues to life for participants.
We are putting together our schedule of workshops for 2008 and have decided, due to the demand for this workshop, to run one in Canberra on 3rd December.
The details can be found here. The venue will be at Regatta Point overlooking Lake Burley Griffin. We look forward to welcoming you there.
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| 12/11/07 | | Last week's conversation at the Churchill Club |
Last week the Churchill Club hosted a conversation titled, What's Your Story? Leon Gettler (journalist at The Age), Andrea Lemon (scriptwriter, author, theatre director and circus ethnographer) and I formed the panel. Brendan Lewis, the club's executive director, recorded the session and here it is. Download the mp3 to your iPod and listen when you next walk your dog.
| 7/11/07 | | Stories make brands stronger |
Brandweek reports that the Advertising Research Foundation has just completed a three year study on the effectiveness of TV advertisements in the USA and found that storytelling was the top factor for a successful commercial.
The report contends that in many ways, advertising is stuck in the past. The 20th century was dominated by a one-way transactional focus where ads were pushed at consumers. Today, consumers interact with ads to "co-create" meaning that is powered by emotion and rich narrative. "Advertising has been standing on the sidelines, stuck on the language of positioning," said Randall Ringer, managing director and co-founder, Verse Group, New York. "Telling a story about the brand is more engaging, memorable and compelling than telling a bunch of facts. What worked 30 years ago with a 30-second spot doesn't work today."
[thanks to Dan Heath for the link]
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| 5/11/07 | | Changing people's attitude toward change |
Collaboration brings with it change and complexity and uncertainty. How are we going to do this? What will happen next? Why should we work like that?... are some of the questions that mark the beginning of a collaborative project. It’s all a state of mind! A matter of perspective.
I’m Chandni and I’m new at Anecdote. My first blog is about my experience in managing collaboration and change and an interesting technique - a 10-second test!
To pursue my passion for knowledge, narratives, complexity, people, culture, and change, I’ve flown all the way from UK (where I did my MBA) via Mumbai (India, where I am originally from) to Canberra. My journey at Anecdote started on October 22 and I’m having a great time doing what I really love.
In my previous roles (as Chief Knowledge Developer and Head of the Knowledge Initiative at an ITeS company), I always thought that bringing about change in the culture was a simple thing. Our workforce was young and spirited and we were innovative and had an open working environment…what could be difficult about that?
Well, I was obviously very wrong and spent a few years figuring out why some people share what they know quite easily, some literally ‘find’ obstacles and put them in the way or some simply don’t want to be disturbed. So I divorced the explicit aspect and started exploring the social aspects of knowledge-sharing behavior, and in talking to people I discovered that narratives have a unique power that often remains untapped. Aligning the right technique to the right situation, that’s where the trick lies. I’m guilty of missing target too!
Let’s change that.
At Anecdote, we continuously seek and design techniques to deal with the complexity within organizations by understanding the ‘story behind the story’. What stories are people saying about an event or experience in their workplace?
Now, (this is my MBA talking) a lot has been said about how denial is the first stage in change management. And collaboration initiatives are a big change for people sometimes. BUT the more important aspect is that there are reasons and stories that form this denial in people’s minds.
Here’s an interesting technique I stumbled upon on Ken Thompson’s blog. He has some good collaboration techniques listed, but this one is a great insight. He calls it a 10 second test to assess people's reaction to change.
How can you quickly find out what each team member's number one concern is about working in this scenario?Dr Lewis recommends you get each of them to repeat the following 5 words out loud without thinking about it too much:
"We can’t do that here”
Listen carefully to which of the five words they stress – if its:
We – they are worried about their Identity
Can’t – they are worried about their beliefs and values
Do – they are worried about their skills
That – they are worried about their behavior
Here – they are worried about the environment
It might then be useful to probe the domains the participants seem most concerned about using anecdote circles to collect stories about the concerns that in fact may be the cause of their resistance or concern.
When you try it out, let us know how it went for you. We’d be happy to hear your story ☺
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| 6/10/07 | | The importance of the rough sketch |
Last week Robyn and I were in Adelaide starting a project to help a company get a community of practice up and running. As we were talking to our client explaining our approach I was mindful of all the rough sketches of models I use to communicate ideas. With this in mind I stumbled upon this great new web service called Sketchcast which enables you to jot a sketch and provide a voice over explanation. So I thought I would give is a go and show you how I typically introduce executives on why they might want to use narrative techniques.
Technorati Tags: sketchcast, cynefin
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| 1/10/07 | | Power of storytelling |
We have blogged previously about 50 Lessons, a site featuring over 500 short videos of business leaders describing some of their key learnings. There are two videos here that describe why stories are powerful. Well worth a look.
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| 1/10/07 | | Writing it down |
Given my publicly confessed reluctance to begin blogging you might be surprised to find me a strong supporter of the written word. The pleasure for me in creating elaborate photo albums for my family lies in the extensive journalling that accompanies the pictures on the page. My frustration with the pile of black and white photos I inherited from my mother was a direct result of finding no clue as to who is in the photo or where it was taken. Worse still was finding a tiny scrap of information in the cryptic words "Our Alf, 1944" or " John's baptism, 1951". So I've overcompensated by making sure that I have told as many of our family stories as possible. Just not in public.
But it might not be privacy issues that keep you from writing. Kerry Patterson, one of the authors of "Crucial conversations: tools for talking when stakes are high", addresses the Power of the Pen in his August newsletter. You can also download it as an MP3 or podcast.
Maybe we're reluctant to express ourselves in writing because our first attempts to capture our thoughts and dreams typically fell under the chilling gaze of the grammarians who accused us of dangling our modifiers and splitting our infinitives when all we really wanted to do was tell our story and have someone read it.
He contends that writing is simply not our medium of choice any more and that's a pity because it is still a powerful tool for influence. His article is worth reading for the powerful story he tells of how quickly and well the Maya people, an indigenous people of Central America, understood the value of the written word once it became available to them.
| 23/09/07 | | Why we need stories from the edge |
I came across the idea of the power law when I read Duncan Watt's Six Degrees. It's the one that best describes city population distributions, the size of hubs in networks, the popularity of blog sites, word frequencies and the Pareto principle, to name just a few. In power law systems there's one standout (the biggest city, the most frequently used word, the most popular blog) then the rest trail off into a very long trail. Imagine one of those fun drop slides where you hang from a bar, let go and enjoy a terrific slide to the end. The shape of a drop slide is the same as a power law if you graph these distributions. Quite a different shape to the normal, bell-curve distribution we were all told at university best represented the world we live in. Power laws tell us to notice the extremes. Bell curves tell us to remove the outliers and look at the majority.
Do you know the difference between character and characterisation when you are crafting a story? In Story, Robert McKee tells us that characterisation is what you can see, the observable qualities: a person's age, gender, occupation, how they dress. Whereas character is revealed by their action when there are tough choices to be made. In the final season of the West Wing, Bruno (the Republican campaign advisor) finds Senator Santos' (the Democratic presidential candidate) briefcase and Bruno brings it to his boss, Senator Vinnick who's running against Santos. Vinnick is presented with a dilemma: leak the contents of briefcase and gain an advantage in the campaign or return the briefcase to Santos. His actions in tough situations when there is much at stake reveal his character. Vinnick returns the briefcase.
Stories are told at the edge and from the edge. We recount remarkable events which in turn communicate those events that reveal our colleague's character. This is why stories are at the heart of organisational culture but they don't magically appear without a trigger. They come from remarkable things that are happening.
Sometimes people say to me, “does that story really represent the majority of what people think?” My first response is to say we are less interested in a single story than the patterns many stories reveal. But the question does reveal bell-curve thinking where the outliers don't matter, they're an aberration to be ignored. But think of every major breakthrough in how things are done. Each one came from the edges. The trap we make for ourselves comes from the wonderful minds we have and their ability to make sense and explain things after the event. “Of course Google had to happen, 911 was a foreseeable tragedy waiting to happen, the ability to show videos on the net would result in a multi-billion dollar purchase”—bollocks! In hindsight it all makes sense to us and we believe we can predict what is coming next by analysing past events. Those days are well behind us now. From now on we need to design for serendipity, furiously take action, make mistakes, but most importantly create situations where ideas can bubble up and and be tried out.
Stories are a double edge sword. On the one hand they deliver the messages from the edge. On the other hand they are the carriers of sensemaking, explanation and encapsulate the causes that brought us here today. Stories help us simplify what happened. We need to be both wary of and embrace stories. Get used to paradoxes. Charles Handy said it was the age of unreason and I think he is right.
While I haven't finished the book yet I'm finding The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb an inspiration that's generating so many thoughts. Last week I had the good fortune to have a hour long chat with Tom Peters at the AIM Convention. It turns out we both share many intellectual interests such as Karl Weick's work on sensemaking, a love of storytelling and a desire to challenge the status quo. In that conversation Tom said I was crazy if I didn't read The Black Swan. I'm glad I took his advice.
Technorati Tags: black swan, karl weick, nassim nicholas taleb, tom peters
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| 22/09/07 | | Storytelling in organisations (and organizations) |
The Anecdote website is all about storytelling in organisations. You can get an idea of how we use business narrative by checking out how we help organisations use business narrative. But to get you started with some ideas, here are a few links to posts other people have found useful (based in del.icio.us).
- Questions to elicit stories
- Finding success stories
- 10 reflections on storytelling
- The Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles
- How I used a story spine
- Hierarchy of explaination or why narrative is becoming more important
- Squidoo Lens on Business Narrative
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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.
| 23/08/07 | | A short history of Anecdote |
On the weekend I created this presentation about how we got started and I describe some of the projects we've done.
There are five parts. Here are the other links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOAtwhgSTf8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYuwumeWn_E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BweLmKlTbnI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd7WVri5aCI
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| 10/08/07 | | How a transcript can enhance listening |
I've just returned from a couple of days in New Zealand working with my old colleagues from IBM. It was a fun to spend two days thinking and talking about knowledge strategy.
I had lunch with Ross Pearce from IBM and he told me how he helped two parts of a company resolve their communications difficulties using an anecdote circle. He got both parties in the room and encouraged them to tell their stories about what was happening. The session went for three hours! One participant came up to Ross at the end of the session and thanked him because it was one of the very few times they have had a conversation without the pressure of delivering a specific output. A good start but the interesting insight came later.
Ross recorded and transcribed the meeting and sent the 100 page transcript to all the attendees asking them to read it. At first they resisted—“it's so long, we don't have time”. they lamented—but after some gentle persuasion they all agreed. In fact it was quite easy to read because it was in their language, it was their words.
A week later they all met again and many of the participants said the same thing about reading the transcript: “I can't believe how much I missed at our first meeting. I guess I was too busy thinking about the next thing I was going to say and failed to listen properly.”
This second meeting was the watershed for the relationship between the two groups. And while Ross never provided me with the details I got the sense that there now existed a foundation to rebuild the rapport between the two groups.
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| 2/08/07 | | Evolving storylines to create your first journey |
Rick Davies, the creator of the Most Significant Change techniques, has posted a description of a story-based technique he experimented with that's designed to help a group of people imagine a set of future possibilities or, as Rick puts it, when embarking on a project we need “... a theory of change, and a theory of change when spelled out in detail can be seen as a story.”
Rick's experiment was conducted with a group of secondary students but it's clear this participatory process could be used in organisations. I'm particularly interested in how it might be used in our First Journey process. Here's my rewriting of Rick's process based on how it might work with a group of ten senior managers in the first journey.
- Give the ten participants some small filing cards, and asked them each to write the beginning of a story on one card about how the project we are about the embark will unfold. When completed, these ten cards are then posted, as a column of cards, on the left side of a whiteboard. This provided some initial variation
- Then ask the same participants to read all ten cards on the board, and for each of them to identify the story beginning they most liked. This involved selection
- Ask the participants to each use a second card to write a continuation of the one story beginning they most liked. These story segments are then posted next to the one story beginning they most liked. As a result, some stories beginnings will gain multiple new segments, others none. This step involves retention of the selected story beginnings, and introduction of further variation.
- Then ask participants to look at all the stories again, now they had been extended. Ask them to write a third generation story segment, which they add to the emerging storyline they most liked so far. This process is re-iterated for four generations or longer.
Rick then analyses the results of his experiment and explores different ways people could use the technique.
For me this approach would be ideal to get people talking about the possibilities of a project. It could be then followed by a pre-mortem to provide a reality check.
Technorati Tags: rick davies
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| 29/07/07 | | Quicklinks |
Just cleaning up my Bloglines and thought I would share some of the posts I was saving.
- Brad Hinton reflects on oral history and storytelling and points to some useful resources.
- Stephen Dubner (of Freakonomics) sharing Mark Twain's view of work and play.
- If you have read Made to Stick, you might also like these columns from the Heath brothers in Fast Company.
- Psychologist Daniel Gilbert writes some excellent essays. Here is one on our biases.
- This is a neuroscience blog and here they talk about the difference in thinking with exploration or direct reward
- Why It's Hard to Get Rid of Old Ideas - this will be the subject of an upcoming post I think
- Supporting Community of Practice Facilitators by Stephen Dale (well worth signing up to Stephen's RSS)
- Here I reveal (again) my stationary fetish. Grid and ruled paper.
- Victoria Ward on silence.
Enjoy!
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| 23/07/07 | | Collecting stories - the role of the imaginary person |
Aiden Choles has just posted a nice piece on how he used role play within an anecdote circle to collect stories. This is how it happened. He was starting to explore the prevalent myths in the organisation he's working with when one of the participants mentioned change house cleaners.
It turns out that at a point in time in the past, there were Change Houses on mine shafts where the miners would change into and out of their underground clothing before and after shifts. These Houses were significant social convergence points and the Change House Cleaner was party to all the gossip and everyday talk that the miners shared with each other. And so, the Cleaners developed a valuable social currency as they became nodes of communal information.
But it has been some time since the Change Houses were around, but the character of the Change House Cleaner still lives on. And so when speaking of a rumour in the organisation, people ask where they got the information. The answer: “The Change House Cleaner told me.”
Aiden's next step in the anecdote circle is ingenious. After discovering the change house cleaners Aiden pulls up an empty chair and says it is the change house cleaner and starts to ask the group questions about this imaginary person.
I asked if the Cleaner was a man of woman.
“Man!”, they said unanimously.
And what is his name?
“Simon!”
Okay, what else would Simon tell us about this organisation?
“He would tell us about the shafts that are about to close.”
“He would tell us about who is sleeping with who”.
“He would tell us about our CEOs secret life”.
“But wait”, someone said, “I was speaking to Simon this morning and he was telling me about the situation in Zimbabwe”.
From that point on a new and passionate conversation started revealing more about what really was happening in that organisation.
(Thanks to Matt Moore for the link)
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| 21/07/07 | | Will Wright's new game Spore and decision games |
Have you ever played SimCity? I remember the first time I had a go at that game. It was 1990. I was amazed.
Well, the creator of SimCity is getting ready to launch a new game called Spore which will enable players to evolve their own universes from a single cell organism right up to intergalactic space travellers.
I was just watching the TED video of Will Wright and the statement that grabbed my attention was his deep desire to “re-calibrate your instincts” by letting your discover for yourself principles and laws of nature without being overtly and directly told.
I think you will be amazed at the TED preview of Spore but you can also do simpler things to develop your staff's instincts using what Gary Klein calls decision games. These games are simple stories with two features: they must pose a conundrum; and there shouldn't be a right or wrong solution. The idea behind decision games is the fact that meaningful experience improves your ability to make good judgements (what Wright was calling calibrating your instincts). And the most meaningful experience is, of course, real life experience. Sadly we can't rely on having real life experiences when we need them. So instead we can play decision games.
Decision games are a way to practice making judgements before you need to make them. They consist of a scenario which a group of people review then decide how they would proceed. The most important aspect of a decision game is the conversation it triggers.
Here's how they work.
The facilitator reads the story to the group.
The participants are given three to five minutes to develop a response and give reasons why (what would you do and why?)
Then the facilitator call on someone to respond and suggest how they would resolve the dilemma.
After the first person provides their response the facilitator then probes for their rationale and perhaps try and elicit other stories. You might also challenge the person about the weak points and downside of the course of action.
Then the facilitator ask others to comment on this solution and to present their ideas so several people get their turn in the hot seat.
Finally you should have a general discussion about how to avoid or minimise these types of problems.
The game should take 30 minutes to run with an additional 20 minutes for general discussion.
It is good to end the session when there is still something to get out of the discussion.
The game has been a success if the participants are still talking about the scenario as they return to their desk.
The preceeding description is based on Gary Klien's book, “Intuition at Work: Why Developing Your Gut Instincts Will Make You Better at What You Do”
We have just developed some decision games for a government agency to help new Aboriginal staff develop ways to balance their community obligations with their departmental commitments.
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| 21/07/07 | | Steve Denning picks up on story-listening |
I was just reading Steve Denning's latest newsletter and I noticed that he has picked up on the importance of story-listening in his latest book. He writes:
Obviously, I'm a great fan of storytelling. And yet, I have to say, there's also something basically wrong with the term, “storytelling”. If you take it literally, it implies a kind of one-way relationship: “I tell and you listen.”
The kind of “storytelling” that I advocate in The Secret Language of Leadership is very much two-way. It's interactive. There's at least as much “story listening” as “storytelling”.
I'm thinking now we need to go one step further and look for ways for stories to create new conversations and new actions. It's not simply telling stories and listening to stories but harnessing this narrative interaction to trigger new ways of thinking. I haven't read Steve's ideas on narrative intelligence yet and I look forward to see what he says.
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| 13/07/07 | | Victoria Ward is blogging |
I can't say how excited I was to find Victoria Ward blogging. I noticed a link to her site over at Bev Trayner's blog (thanks Bev).
So who is Victoria Ward? Victoria founded Sparknow in 1997 and I discovered her work when I was in London last year. Her knowledge of narrative practice is impressive, which is evident from her Taste the Knowledge blog. I've never met Victoria but I hope our paths cross soon.
This insight is illustrative of Victoria's narrative knowledge.
I hold that it is the complexity, ambiguity, discomfort and unease in storytelling (contextualised appropriately through facts and evidence) that is the point. It should not speed up transmission. It should slow transmission, make things messier, harder to grasp, so that the listener/viewer must absorb layers of complexity and develop his or her own judgements about how to act in the light of the experience of receiving the story.
The mainstream business storytellers of course say the exact opposite and while both perspectives are true I think Victoria's slow narrative perspective is more conducive to sensemaking and better decision making. Fast narrative can taste good but we are rarely satisfied and often suffer the consequences in the future.
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| 26/06/07 | | It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story |
I read this lovely quote in the following paper, Petranker, J. (2005) 'The When of Knowing', The Journal of Applied Behavioural Science, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 241-259.
“When you are in the middle of a story, it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion, a dark roaring, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood, like a house in a whirlwind, crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all, when you are telling it to yourself, or to somebody else.”
Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
Thanks to Keren Winterford for sending it to me.
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| 19/06/07 | | The difficulty in being the expert interpreting a story |
Scientific American.com has an amusing piece by Steve Mirsky that highlights one of the reasons why experts shouldn't attempt to interpret stories—there are many truths in a story (in fact plausibility is more important than truth) and you will tell the one that suits your purpose.
For this reason we often work with many stories and help our clients to see the (sometime contradictory) patterns within them. Most importantly the stories act as a trigger for new conversations, sensemaking and agreement among a group of decision makers on the way forward. It's this common purpose that's powerful when there are no clear rights or wrongs.
Here is Mirsky's example of two ways to tell the story of how a Jack Russell saved the day.
Consider this story, reported by the Associated Press in early May, carrying the headline “Tiny Terrier Saved Kids from Pit Bulls.” The story, filed from Wellington, New Zealand, includes these details:
“A plucky Jack Russell terrier named George saved five children from two marauding pit bulls.... George was playing with the group of children as they returned home from buying sweets.” So far we have an anthropomorphized terrier—plucky, and he was playing with them, mind you—and the Little Rascals returning from the candy store, when:
“Two pit bulls appeared and lunged toward them.” Next comes a quote from one of the kids, an 11-year-old animal behaviorist: “‘George tried to protect us by barking and rushing at them, but they started to bite him.’” Note that she goes beyond description to narrative herself—George’s primary interest was her safety. Now comes the resolution of the situation, according to the 11-year-old: “‘We ran off crying, and some people saw what was happening and rescued George.’”
The headline and the article thus conspire to portray a brave little dog that tried to rescue human children. And that may indeed be what happened. Based solely on the facts reported in this piece, however, we may construct a somewhat different narrative. The pit bulls appeared and moved in on the group; the terrier rushed at them; the pit bulls focused their attention on the terrier; the kids ran away. In other words, the same reported facts could have led to a story that carried the headline “Five Frightened Kids Flee as Tiny Dog Is Attacked.”
Thanks to Les Posen for the link to the Scientific American article.
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| 13/06/07 | | Definition of an Anecdote |
I was over at Wikipedia today and ended up on the Anecdote article. Here's their definition of an anecdote, which I think is pretty good.
An anecdote is a short tale narrating an interesting or amusing biographical incident. It may be as brief as the setting and provocation of a bon mot. An anecdote is always based on real life, an incident involving actual persons, whether famous or not, in real places. However, over time, modification in reuse may convert a particular anecdote to a fictional piece, one that is retold but is “too good to be true”. Sometimes humorous, anecdotes are not jokes, because their primary purpose is not simply to evoke laughter, but to reveal a truth more general than the brief tale itself, or to delineate a character trait or the workings of an institution in such a light that it strikes in a flash of insight to their very essence. A brief monologue beginning “A man pops in a bar...” will be a joke. A brief monologue beginning “Once J. Edgar Hoover popped in a bar...” will be an anecdote. An anecdote thus is closer to the tradition of the parable than the patently invented fable with its animal characters and generic human figures— but it is distinct from the parable in the historical specificity which it claims. An anecdote is not a metaphor nor does it bear a moral, a necessity in both parable and fable, merely an illustrative incident that is in some way an epitome.
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| 11/06/07 | | Staff induction or orientation |
I might have mentioned a few posts ago that we are currently helping a government department develop a staff induction program for their Aboriginal employees. One of the suggestions we've made is for new employees to seek out stories from others in the department as a way to create new relationships while also developing an understanding of how things work around here.
I noticed that Dave Snowden has come to similar conclusions. He says,
... one of the methods we created (Open Source and free, but this one is not documented yet so what follows is covered by a creative commons license) is to send people when they join an organisation on a treasure hunt. You give them some categories (A senior engineer with more than ten years experience, someone in accounts who has field experience) and tell them to gather in stories from those people. You don't give them names, they have to develop social networks to find them. Once they have gathered those stories, then, in front of their peers and after some training, they perform their own story, taking their own history, the stories of the elders and the current context to show how they stand in, not apart from the flow of history.
I like Dave's idea for the new staff to create their own story and than retelling it to their peers. It is in this retelling that sensemaking occurs.
While working on this project I've done some searching of the literature to see if others have developed staff induction programs for Aboriginal workers. I couldn't find much as at. Any pointers here would be welcomed.
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| 6/06/07 | | Narrative Techniques for Business Workshop in Sydney - 26 July |
It's been over a year since we presented this workshop in Australia, so we are pleased to say we are running our narrative techniques for business workshop in Sydney next month. This workshop has been a tremendous success and we have recently revamped the workshop handbook.
Here is a full description of the workshop.
Here are a couple of screenshots from the manual.
The cost of the workshop is $350 if you register before the end of June and $475 after that.
Please pass on this message to anyone who you think might find this workshop useful and interesting. We have found people in organisational development, learning, human resources, communications, knowledge management and change management get most value from this day.
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| 1/06/07 | | Finding and amplifying a sense of direction—directional stories |
This week I have been talking to people about foundational stories and how they are important for reinforcing the core vales and direction for everyone in the organisation. HP has a well know foundation story about Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard starting their little electronics company in a garage with a measly $500. Within this story are the basic principles HP was built on.
The foundation story is not the only directional story that people should hear but without good directional stories an organisation can be overwhelmed by whatever stories that well up with each passing day. Here's one example of when things get out of hand. I was at an investment bank and asked the HR Director what stories were prominent in his company. He shook his head in dismay and said, “We have a relatively new CEO and have just finished our vision, mission and values project. Everyone is telling the story that the CEO went home on Friday, pulled out the vision, mission, values from his previous company, came into the office on Sunday, photocopied the statements onto A3 paper and plastered them around level 27. For the life of me I can't dislodge this story.”
Directional stories already exist. You just need to work together with everyone in the organisation to find them and instil their telling throughout the organisation. We use the three journeys process to help clients find and amplify their own directional stories.
Then serendipity stribes. Just I was thinking about this topic I read this story in a chapter by Karl Weick about how VISA was started. What do you think this foundational story conveys about the values of VISA?
Here's what happened at VISA. In the early 1970s, National BankAmericard Incorporated (NBI) turned around the Bank of America's faltering credit card business in the United States (Hock, 1999, p. 155). Soon thereafter, NBI was pressured by BankAmericard licensees in the rest of the world to do the same thing for them. The problems were formidable. Not only did each licensee also have different marketing, computer, and operational systems, but each licensee also dealt with different language, currency, culture, and legal systems, all of which had to be transcended somehow. A technological fix was out of the question because banks were still using computer punch cards and tape, and there was no Internet. After months of tense negotiations, a meeting of the organizing committee was scheduled late in the second year of organizing. The meeting was to one last attempt to resolve three deal-breaking disagreements. Positions had hardened and the organizers could think of no compromise that had any chance of being accepted.
Shortly before the final meeting, the chairman of the organizing committee, Dee Hock, reflected on how the international group had been able to get as far as they did. It dawned on him that “at critical moments, all participants had felt compelled to succeed. And at those same moments , all had been willing to compromise. They had not thought of winning or losing but of a larger sense of purpose and concept of community that could transcend and enfold them” (1999, p. 245). Hock and his staff hatched a plan for the final meeting. They contacted a local jeweler and asked him to create a die from which he would cast sets of golden cuff links. One ciff link would contain a picture of half of the globe and the phrase, “the will to succeed.” The other link would contain the other half of the globe and the phrase, “the grace to compromise.”
When the final meeting actually convened, as expected it was polarized, contentious. The Canadian banks refused to participate and withdrew, and Hock adjourned the meeting midday and said they would reconvene the next morning on order to plan how to disband. Before adjourning, Hock invited everyone to a grand dinner that evening in Sausalito in recognition of their undeniable efforts to try to make the organization work.
After dinner, there was brief reminiscing about shared experiences and obstacles overcome. The the waiters passed among the diners and placed a small wrapped gift in front of each of them. Hock asked people to open the elegant boxes and examine the contents.
He then said quietly, “We wanted to give you something that you could keep for the remainder of your life as a reminder of this day. On one link is half of the world surrounded with the phrase ”the will to succeed“ and the second link is the other half of the world and the phrase 'the grace to compromise.' We meet tomorrow for the final time to disband the effort after two arduous years. I have one last request. Will you please wear the cuff links to the meeting in the morning? When we part we will take with us a reminder for the rest of our lives that the world can never be united through us because we lack the will to succeed and the grace to compromise. But if by some miracle our differences dissolve before morning, this gift will remind us that the world was united because we did have the will to succeed and the grace to compromise (paraphrased from Hock, 1999, pp. 247-48)
Then Hock sat down. There was a full minute of absolute silence as people examined their gift. And then the silence was shattered by one of Hock's exuberant Canadian friends who exploded, ”You miserable bastard!“ The room erupted in laughter. The next morning everyone was wearing the cuff links. By noon, agreement was reached on every issue and VISA International came into existence.
Weick, K, 2004. Rethinking Organizational Design in Richard J. Boland Jr, and Fred Collopy (eds) Managing as Designing, Stanford Business Books, Stanford.
Hock, D. 1999. Birth of the chaordic age. Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco
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| 30/05/07 | | The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation's Story Guide in now online |
Great news. The Story Guide: Building Bridges Using Narrative Techniques is now available online. Our reader, Jon Revelos, just posted the link today as a comment to this post. Thanks John.
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| 25/05/07 | | You can't predict anything |
Chris Anderson has listed his 5 top business books and I was struck by this explanation of why you must read Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Taleb.
Why it's a must-read: “The book says that you can't predict anything—that when things happen, you try to construct a narrative around what happened, and that narrative is almost always wrong. Why is the market up today? Because home sales did such and such. It's almost never why, but we need to have an explanation. If managers can check themselves from making those all-too-tempting efforts to construct narratives, fundamentally they will have an advantage over the rest of us.”
This thinking is flawed. The idea that we can consciously put a stopper in our habit of creating stories to explain what is happening is as impossible as the ability to predict the future in detail in a complex system. Here's an alternative, why don't we work to understand how stories create meaning and insight and then look to ways of harnessing our innate storytelling nature.
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| 23/05/07 | |