| 2/02/10 | | One public workshop this year: influencing change with stories |
We often get asked whether we are running any public courses on our techniques but for the last couple of years we have reserved these courses for our clients.
But this February and March we are running one workshop on influencing change with stories in collaboration with Kevin Bishop, most recently the Royal Bank of Scotland's change manager in the UK.
If you would like to attend here are all the details.
We only have limited places so please let us know as soon as you can to secure a spot.
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| 16/11/09 | | The role scripts play in finding stories |
Everyday we tell those closest to us (our family, friends, colleagues) about what happened to us: today, yesterday, last week. Occasionally we'll reminisce about the old days but for those we know well what's worth recounting, what's remarkable, is happening on a daily basis. We don't even need to tell the whole story because the people we know well have much of the background. We tell the smaller details that wouldn't make sense or be interesting to someone we didn't know that well. The storytelling is gradual.
Imagine you grew up without knowing anything about restaurants. You've never heard of them, never seen them and have never had an experience, apart from eating a meal at home, that is anything like going to a restaurant. Then one day a friend takes you to one and you can't believe that you can just order your meal, that waiters bring your meal and clear away all the dirty dishes. For you this is truly remarkable and if someone ask you to share your experience you could do it without hesitation.
For those people who go to restaurants regularly much of the experience is invisible. We're not surprised by waiters, menus, asking for the bill, etc.. We have developed a script for what a restaurant experience will be like and we will only notice things if something unexpected happens. These scripts are important. Without them we would have to think through everything. It would be exhausting.
Important knowledge, however, resides in the scripts. It's difficult to recount stories for someone who is not close about what you do day-in, day-out. You're not sure they care about the small stories you tell to those people who see you every day. There is an art to collecting stories, especially the small ones.
I mention this conumdrum because just knowing that stories can get converted to scripts will help anyone who is trying to elicit stories to go beyond what's remarkable to a stranger. For a long time I was flummoxed at times during an anecdote circle when the participants could only give you broad illustrations of what they did at work rather than specific anecdotes. It didn't happen often but when it did I couldn't explain it. With this explanation I do three things to find the small stories.
- be truly interested in every detail. Curiosity must exude from your pores
- use memory triggers: timelines, artefacts, pictures
- get peers together in the anecdote circle
The next frontier for me will be cognitive task analysis. I have Crandall, Klein and Hoffman's book, Working Minds and I'm looking forward to learning more about the techniques.
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| 16/09/09 | | Random thoughts on anecdotes |
Here are some thoughts/experiences from last week regarding anecdotes, how to elicit them and story-telling
- Last Wednesday I listened to Alana, an Aboriginal lady, tell a traditional teaching story and we chatted afterwards. In organisations we generally see stories morph over time, with details changing but much of the meaning being retained. Alana explained that this is not what happens with traditional aboriginal stories. She had been given permission to tell the story with the strict understanding that she would re-tell the story precisely as it had been told to her. By insisting on the exact reproduction of the story the meaning is much less likely to change over time and in this way knowledge can be passed faithfully from generation to generation.
- Shawn and I have the general view that 'how' and 'why' questions will normally elicit opinions and generalisations rather than anecdotes. 'When' and 'where' questions are generally better at generating experiences. Also on Wednesday, I heard a 'how' question that is fantastic to get anecdotes: 'How did you meet Grandma?' The great thing about this question is that it takes you to a very specific event and it can't help but result in an anecdote (unless Grandpa is in a grumpy mood).
- A lady told me how she had been nearly hit by a Sydney Buses bus as she was on a roundabout. Instead of indicating he had made a mistake, the driver made a gesture that she interpreted as "tough cookies". Furious, she took down the bus number and by 4.30 that afternoon had sent an email to Sydney Buses complaining. By 9.30am the next day she had a response confirming that they expected high standards of driving behavior and that the incident she descibed was unacceptable. They had identified the driver and organised to meet with him that day discuss the matter. She spoke very highly of Sydney Buses as a result, thought they were doing a good job. It goes to show, anger dissipates when people are listened to...
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| 24/08/09 | | Explaining the world around us with stories |
In 1944 psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel published a paper in The American Journal of Psychology. It was a simple idea. Make a film of geometric shapes moving about and then ask the subjects "... to write down what happened in the picture." 1
Here's a slightly cut down version of the original film (the original was 2.5 minutes long and this one seems to be a mirror image or the original).
Watch the video and write down what happened.
Of the 34 undergraduate women who participated in the experiment only one described what they saw in geometric terms. 31 described the objects as people and two as birds. 33 people told a story of what happened.
Humans have a natural tendency to ascribe purpose and meaning to what we see even when there is very little to suggest it. As Brian Boyd says, "it is safer to mistake a twig for a snake than vice versa." 2
The same is true in the workplace. If the CEO arrives announced on your floor, and she rarely visits your part of the building, you will quickly piece together what you know to tell yourself a story that explains her visit: it's end of the quarter, she is in with one of the comms managers, she is probably getting her speech ready for the analysts' meeting. It's plausible. It puts your mind to rest so you get back to work. Then a colleague scurries over to your desk and says "there has been a major accident at the plant." You quickly reassess what you thought was happening with the CEO's visit and reformulate your story. The new story replaces the old.
Stories help us make sense of what's happening but we do have a tendency to overreact to over-interpret.
Leaders should be always thinking about their actions and what stories will people be telling themselves as a result of their actions.
1. Heider, F. and M. Simmel (1944). "An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior." The American Journal of Psychology 57(2): 243-259.
2. Boyd, B. (2009). On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction. Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 137.
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| 8/08/09 | | Narrative or story-based approach to employee engagement |
Late last year, a company approached us on the topic of employee engagement.
They’d received the results of their biannual engagement survey and, as with previous years, realised that the data pointed them to strengths and potential weaknesses but didn't help understand what was really going on, or what to do about it. The data might show that 63% of staff agreed or strongly agreed with the statement 'I am proud to work for this company' and this might be down 6% from the previous survey. On its own however, the data doesn't help with the question "what does this mean and what should be done? "
Narrative approaches are excellent for exploring these sorts of issues and helping organisations find out what is really going on, and what actions they can take to reinforce things that are going well, and improving things that need work. The survey data is vital 'targeting information' but on its own it is an insufficient basis for planning. Thus, exploring employee engagement is a natural marriage of traditional approaches such as surveys and the emerging practice of narrative.
Our approach to staff engagement looks like this:
- Employee engagement surveys often focus on areas such as: do people say positive or negative things about the organisation; their intent to stay with the company; and whether they are motivated to strive to do the best they can for the company. In preparing for the narrative project, the survey data is examined to identify the themes to be explored, the geographic or structural areas to focus on and the people to involve in the project. Key stakeholders are also asked for their views on the survey results and the things that are of most concern or surprise to them.
- We use anecdote circles during the 'discovery phase' of these projects to collect a large number of examples (anecdotes) of how staff at all levels in the organisation experience issues on a day-to-day basis. The anecdote circles are an intervention in themselves as they get groups of people sharing their experiences; people value the opportunity to be listened to and participants learn from each other about how things get done. Recently, during an anecdote circle, a participant related how he received a call early one morning from his manager asking if he’d heard about the severe storm warning for his area (he hadn't). The manager was worried about him driving to work in the storm and requested that he work from home that day. The guy telling the story was really impressed by the phone call. This was a great example of how small actions can really help build employee engagement.
- In the sensemaking phase a significant and diverse groups of influencers are exposed to a cross-section of the collected anecdotes and are facilitated to engage in dialogue with each other to identify issues and themes regarding the current situation. The idea of sensemaking is to develop a rich and common understanding among these influencers of the current situation and its history. Exposure to the anecdotes provides participants with insights into what really goes on in the organisation; this can be quite confronting at times. Nonetheless, sensemaking is a vital step as the individual and collective understand it provides is the springboard for deciding what action to take. The sensemaking workshop takes between 4 hours to a full day and one of its valuable side effects is that individuals will often change (deliberately or sub-consciously) their behaviour back in the workplace as a result of the new understanding they’ve developed. This is an important step as one of the key actions to improve staff engagement is to 'stop doing things that piss staff off.'
- Complex problems cannot be 'solved' in any traditional sense and the way to make progress is to try things and see what happens. Using the deep understanding developed during the sensemaking phase, we involve the influencers in identifying the actions that can be taken to move the situation in a desirable direction. Our approach to this stage (which we call initiative design) is strongly influenced by the characteristics of complex problems meaning we encourage the organisation to identify lots of small scale actions that can be implemented at an individual or team level, based on the knowledge that with complex problems, little things can make a big difference. We also encourage the development of a 'continual improvement process' that aims to get these changes embedded in the fabric of the organisation.
- The final stage is to monitor what happens as a result of the actions taken - reinforcing the patterns that are beneficial and disrupting the ones that aren't. This is achieved through the embedding process developed during sensemaking and by using techniques such as most significant change. A planned monitoring regime is important as it helps detect changes - it also works as an incentive to implement the actions identified during intervention design
Since the initial approach, several other unrelated opportunities have emerged to work with companies to explore their employee engagement outcomes. Our extensive work in leadership/management development also has a strong link to employee engagement (as the main roles of a manager can be summarised as 'driving performance' and 'building engagement'). It looks like employee engagement is a growing area for us to apply narrative approaches.
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| 22/05/09 | | London public workshops in June |
Just a quick note to say it is just over 4 weeks before we get together in London for our two workshops (24 & 25 June). Looks like we have a good turn out but if you are thinking of coming along I need to get all the registrations complete in the next two weeks.
Send me an email if you want a registration form and here is the description of the two narrative based workshops.
And just to get a bit of a flavour for my approach you might like to check out this presentation I did this week.
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| 29/04/09 | | Story week starts on Monday |
As flagged previously, Anecdote, Innotecture and Sparknow are running Story Week commencing on Monday 4th May. Story week aims to explore how to identify stories that have impact and the consistency (if any) with which people rate the impact of stories.
This is of interest for a range of reasons. Firstly, our Narrative Insight process involves collection of large numbers of stories - too many to be used in workshop settings - and we often need to identify the ones that have most impact. Story week will help us understand more about the selection criteria we use and the extent to which they are useful.
Of more relevance to our readers is the second reason. Anyone who gives presentations and talks, writes articles, reports, blog posts etc, can use stories to help communicate more clearly, persuasively and memorably. The stories can come from your own experience, from history, movies or the experience of others. A key challenge is choosing the right stories; the ones that have most impact and are most relevant. We are hoping that Story Week will inform our work to make the selection of the right stories more robust.
Starting Monday, we will post one story per day, seeking as many people as possible to assess the story against the criteria. It will only take a few moments each day.
Get ready!
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| 21/02/09 | | KM is change - and how to do it with stories |
Here is my presentation from the Ark KM for the Experienced Practitioner. I have to admit that it probably doesn't make too much sense without the commentary and the note are not the best but happy to answer any questions.
The presentation is a case study illustration of our three journey narrative approach to organisational change.
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| 12/01/09 | | Gaining insight with archetypes |
To change the way we work we need to change our mental models, and that requires insight.
In The Neuroscience of Leadership David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz describe how our improved understanding of the brain is helping to reorient how we design organisational change initiatives.
The article recommends leaders create situations where their people get a new insight into how they view things: what is the dominant mental model?
One of the most effective technique to help create this insight is archetype extraction. It involves collecting anecdotes from people in the organisation on a theme such as customer service and extracting the archetypes from the many stories.
An archetype is a embodiment of the organisation's culture in the form of a complex yet familiar character. An archetype is usually partly good and partly bad; a complex mix of traits. Not to be confused with a stereotype, which is typically an oversimplification based on simple categorisation or role: "Oh, he's a librarian."
We take these anecdotes into a workshop of 10-20 thought leaders and influencers who could benefit from an alternative perspective.
The workshop participants identify the characters and their character traits from the collected anecdotes on customer service and using a facilitation process they morph into the archetypes, which are often drawn by a cartoonist for greater visual impact.
The cartoons in the post depict some of the archetypes that illustrated the culture of a large Australia organisation. Once the archetypes are identified people can then use them to discuss some of the un-discussables without getting personal.
Most importantly the participants will have obtain a new insight on how the organisation views itself or another group.
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| 14/12/08 | | Just trying out Scribd |
Three journeys: A narrative approach to successful organisational change
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| 10/12/08 | | Business story-listening and storytelling in London |
We are running two workshops in London this June:
- Narrative techniques for business (story-listening)--24th June 09
RSA House
8 John Adam Street
London - Storytelling for business leaders (storytelling)--25th June 09
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square
London
The cost for each workshop is £350
Email us for a registration form.
These two methods are inextricably linked, which we've attempted to illustrate in this diagram.
If you want to learn about these methods and you live near London, here's your chance. Just email me and I will send out a registration form.
Below is a full description of each workshop.
Narrative Techniques for Business
- What's really going on in your organisation?
- What are the touch points where small changes can transform behaviour and morale?
- How can you develop a common understanding of what needs to be done and generate the resolve to do it?
Surveys and metrics can uncover trouble in an organisation, but they usually don't help you identify the reasons for dysfunctions, let alone generate the resolve to springboard people into action. Instead, learn to use stories as listening posts and tap into the emotion to spark action. From time immemorial, stories have contained collective lessons in condensed form. When gathered and examined, stories that are told in your organisation reveal important themes and patterns that in turn indicate effective solutions.
This one-day workshop, led by Australia's leading experts in story listening, teaches you to gather and make sense of stories so as to see revealing patterns and use them to gain traction on solving messy organisational problems or reaching complex goals.
After a full day of instruction, practice and feedback, you will have the confidence and knowledge to apply these powerful techniques within your organisation.
Who should attend?
Anyone struggling with thorny human problems or complex goals such as the following will gain value from this workshop:
- creating culture change
- building trust
- making mergers and acquisitions successful
- capturing the knowledge of retiring employees
- extracting lessons from projects
- improving occupational health and safety
- managing risk
The instruction is grounded in insights from organisational development and the science of complexity as well as in years of hands-on work with a wide range of organisations.
Practical, hands-on training
Story listening is not something you can learn from a manual. This workshop teaches how to find and collect stories, how to make sense of the stories and then how to design interventions that improve how things work. Participants practice each step in the process with one another and receive feedback that improves their understanding and ability to work with organisational stories.
Workshop topics covered include:
- when narrative approaches make sense and when to use other techniques
- how many participants to involve in story gathering and the characteristics you should look for in selecting them
- two techniques that effectively elicit stories from just about anyone
- which media to use for preserving and analyzing stories
- ways to extract meaning from a large volume of stories
- how to formulate ways of tackling truly complex problems based on lessons from the stories
By the end of the day, you will be prepared to run a story listening project using the narrative techniques you have learned and practised. This might aim at collecting lessons learned from a large project, improving employee satisfaction, smoothing the way for massive organisational change or enhancing occupational health and safety.
Here's what previous participants have said
"Anecdote is a great concept, and delivered with very high quality. Honest, thoughtful, valuable. The staff are very generous with their expertise and resources. They are open and approachable, acknowledging both their achievements and how they learned from their mistakes. These people are the real thing. You get a strong sense of how these processes can be applied in business settings. A really great workshop." Ian Colley, MakeStuffHappen
"We were looking for a fresh approach to get the business involved in cultural development. So instead of telling employees the results of our cultural survey and getting them to fix it, we wanted it to be owned by the business and have them discover for themselves the underlying reason why things are the way they are, in a new, explorative and interesting way. So we used Anecdote. It's the narrative discovery approach that provided such rich information about our culture. We would have never been able to get these insights without it. Plus the subsequent cultural initiatives would have missed the mark completely." Andrew Petersen, Challenger Financial Services
Storytelling for Business Leaders
We all need better ways to persuade, share what we know and help those around us make sense of the complex world we live in. Developing our innate storytelling skills helps build confidence, convey ideas clearly and effectively, and probably most importantly, present to our colleagues our humanity.
We all want to convey our ideas with impact, yet eyes instantly glaze the moment you beam your PowerPoint presentation laden with slide after slide of dot points. We know informally that stories are engaging; we tell them at dinner parties and people listen and they 'get it'. Yet few leaders systematically harness storytelling to communicate ideas, convey the organisation`s values or inspire and motivate people.
What the one day workshop is all about
Telling business stories is not about concocting events and delivering your tale to an enraptured audience. Rather, it relies on people retelling their own experiences in an authentic and empathetic way. Anecdote has developed a three-step process to guide you.
Prospecting
Everyone has stories to tell, but in many cases we are unaware of them. Prospecting involves creating a conducive environment for people to remember their stories. This might involve one-on-one interview techniques or group processes.
Patterns
We can improve the way we tell our stories by understanding the story structures and patterns appropriate for the task. During the workshop, we will explore a few key patterns and help participants re-craft their stories based on these story patterns.
Performance
Effective storytelling comes from a belief that the story is authentic. People judge authenticity on how the storyteller delivers their story. Participants will learn ways to develop a comfortable delivery style and feel at ease at telling stories regardless of the setting. This workshop is for anyone wanting to improve their ability to find and tell their own stories within a business context.
Who should attend
This workshop is for anyone wanting to improve their ability to find and tell their own stories within a business context. It is also for people wishing to improve their leaders’ ability to communicate ideas and engage staff in developing new behaviours.
You should attend this course if you are interested in:
- communicating your organisation`s mission, vision and values
- helping leaders motivate and inspire
- conveying desirable behaviours
- sharing knowledge
- becoming a more effective leader
- sparking action
- having people really listening to your ideas.
What you will learn and leave with
- a better understanding of what makes an effective story in a business context
- a newly discovered story- re-crafted story from your own experience
- understanding of how to best craft questions to discover stories
- ways to interview people for stories and facilitate anecdote circles
- when to use what story pattern - build confidence in telling your story.
What attendees have said
'Shawn has a most honest, open and engaging approach which is what is shown to work best with this technique and creates an enjoyable workshop.'
'The workshop covered a lot of territory in a way that combined analytical rigour with a clear and informal delivery. I recommend it without reservation.'
'There's loads of value in the Storytelling for Business Leaders workshop, and it's been a useful part of my leadership development activities.
In my role as Chief Sustainability Officer I'm often using stories about how our clients thinking has shifted around sustainability... they're often very powerful. The workshop has given me ideas and tools on how to actively include stories into presentations to give a better sense to people of who I am and what I stand for, as well as to illustrate key messages. I know they're having effect because of the feedback I receive - that they reflect an authenticity that is engaging - and because I hear people sharing these same stories.'
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| 6/10/08 | | MLA London knowledge transfer project |
MLA stands for Museums and Libraries Association and my friend Victoria Ward has recently finished a tremendous project using narrative techniques to help MLA London understand and enhance the way in which Museums and Libraries are used in London. The bonanza for narrative and knowledge practitioners is that the MLA and Sparknow (Victoria's company) have shared their findings, method and initial pilot descriptions for everyone to download.
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| 9/09/08 | | Narrative-based Change Management |
Our new workshop now has a new name. We're calling it
Putting Stories to Work: Delivering meaningful Change and Engagement
What managers need today is a tool that empowers them to inspire people into action. Narrative techniques can deliver a range of benefits to an organization. It's just a matter of learning the techniques and then putting them to practice.
We've redesigned our narrative techniques workshop with a focus on engagement. Over two days we aim to teach managers how to create a resolve among their staff so that they see the value of the change efforts being undertaken in the organization and participate enthusiastically.
There will be lots of opportunities to practice the techniques and learn from each other's feedback during the sessions. Join us on November 11 and 12 in Melbourne. And if you're keen for us to come to your city, we'd love to hear from you.
A big thanks to Dave Pollard, Nerida Hart, Chris Colton, Luke Naismith, Jeff de Cagna , and Bret Treasure for their suggestions on the workshop name. The conversations triggered some good ideas.
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| 8/09/08 | | Finding stories |
Tell stories to hear stories
Listen to stories to remember your stories
Mark and I penned these observations while developing our course on storytelling. The first one, "tell stories to hear stories," reminds us that a good way to find stories is to tell some yourself. Here's an example. When I see my teenage daughter after school I would often ask how her day went, whether anything interesting happened at school, and the standard response is often monosyllabic: yep, nup. In fact the more questions I'd ask the shorter the answers. So I changed tack and rather than ask questions I simply recounted something that happened in my day. I would launch into something like, "I met a bearded lady today. This morning I drove down to Fitzroy to run an anecdote circle for ..." and immediately my daughter would respond with an encounter from her day. A conversation starts and it's delightful.
Our second reminder is the flip-side to the first. If you want to remember your own stories go listen to other people's stories and then don't forget to jot your anecdotes down. Many of our stories are ephemeral, flooding our memory banks when the conditions are right and evaporating just as quickly. Often a story will come to mind and you will have no idea why you would ever retell it but make a note anyway. Just being aware of our stories is an important first step in the effective application of business narrative.
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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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| 1/08/08 | | Staff induction - not quite |
Last year Robyn and I ran an interesting project for a large government agency to help Aboriginal people join the department and become productive as quickly as possible. More importantly the department wanted to retain more of their Aboriginal staff who would often leave for a myriad of complex reasons. Of course the project was narrative based.
A couple of months ago we presented a paper at LearnX describing this project and what we learned. I just remembered and uploaded the paper to our whitepapers section. Love to hear what you think.
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| 26/07/08 | | What an artist and computer scientist can do with stories |
Jonathan Harris loves playing around with stories and in this 20 minute presentation at the 2007 TED he gives three examples of his work. He seems facinated with how you can collect stories and them represent then using computer graphics.
The project I found most interesting, and it was reminiscent of Cognitive Edge's ground-breaking work in graphically representing stories (check out their Sensemaker software), is his Whale Hunt project. Jonathan describes the Whale Hunt 5:50 min from the start of this video. On a 9-day visit to the Arctic he takes a photo every 5 minutes, day and night, and then displays these photos in a variety of ways (http://thewhalehunt.org/).
I'm certain you will enjoy this video. I also loved the third project exploring happiness in Bhutan.
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| 21/07/08 | | A bunch of Robert McKee resources |
I think one of the first books I read on storytelling was Story by Robert McKee. It's written from the perspective of a screenwriter and conveys a tremendous understanding of story structure. Today I noticed Presentation Zen blogged a long post reviewing a Harvard Business Review article by McKee, some video interviews and a myriad of other resources you might find interesting.
While Garr is mainly focussed on storytelling in this quote, we have found a similar phenomenon in our story-listening work.
The most common way to persuade people, says McKee, is with conventional rhetoric and an intellectual process that in the business world "...usually consists of a PowerPoint presentation" in which leaders build their case with statistics and quotes, etc. McKee says rhetoric is problematic because while we are making our case others are arguing with us in their heads using their own statistics and sources. Even if you do persuade through argument, says McKee, this is not good enough because "...people are not inspired to act on reason alone." The key, then, is to aim to unite an idea with an emotion, which is best done through story. "In a story, you not only weave a lot of information into the telling but you also arouse your listener's emotion and energy." (emphasis added)
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| 2/07/08 | | Matt Moore facilitates a discussion on story work with Madelyn Blair and me |
This morning Madelyn and I met Matt Moore on Skype to chat about story work. Matt's a fast worker and has already posted the podcast. Here are the show notes:
00:00 - Introductions: Madelyn & Shawn's first introduction to storywork.
04:00 - Stories that stick in your mind: Madelyn's story of the Swedish ambassador, the mosque & the stone.
06:00 - Shawn distinguishes between storylistening & storytelling.
08:30 - "Storytelling" as a bit overwhelming vs things that you do everyday.
11:15 - The use of objects in storytelling - Madelyn applies this to mission statements.
13:00 - The importance of context & duckus duckus.
16:00 - Getting different groups to talk.
18:10 - Scientific papers as mystery stories.
And if you are interested in how to use mystery story format to write scientific papers (or any persuasive communication) then check out this post.
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| 27/06/08 | | Guide to anecdote circles |
I've just realised that our Guide to Anecdote Circles has been kind of hidden on our website so I have popped a copy of the guide in the Whitepapers section of the site.
Update: Jenny Murray just pointed out to me that I put a draft version up in the first instance and this note is to let you know I have now replaced it with the final version. Thanks Jenny for letting me know.
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| 19/06/08 | | Indexing books with stories |
I've started a new practice of jotting down, inside the front cover of a book, the anecdotes it contains. It seems to work best for modern business books that have a liberal smattering of stories throughout. It is a useful practice because, like most people, I can remember a story much better that facts and reasoning and the story index is a quick reminder of the key ideas. Here's an example from Clay Shirkey's book, Here Comes Everybody.
It would be terrific if publishers created a story index as a matter of good book publishing practice. Mind you, the act of creating your own story index is a tremendous way to crystallise your learning.
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| 16/06/08 | | Storytelling and leadership |
It's obvious to most people that good leaders are good storytellers. Stories help inspire action because they transport the listener to experience the events recounted in the story in a way that conveys emotion, context and a picture of what happened, and why is happened. We remember these stories. They help change our minds and in doing so, change our behaviours. Storytelling is an important skill for leaders.
But it's not the only way to use stories to help leaders improve their capabilities.
18 months ago we started a narrative-based leadership development program for a global pharmaceutical company. We collected 150 stories of good and bad management behaviour from the staff and then use these stories in a two day program. Twelve managers attend every month and one of the activities we do with them is to facilitate a conversation around the question, which stories are most significant?
One of the stories often selected as significant is a seemingly simple account of a woman whose manager stops whatever he was doing whenever she visited his office, moves to a table in the middle of the room and invites her to sit down and then totally focusses on her. She felt that she was being listened to and her ideas were important. It was remarkable for this woman because other managers didn't do that. The leaders in the program often choose this story as significant because they feel that if only they could get more managers doing this it would create a groundswell of change.
A few weeks ago we refreshed the stories for this company in preparation for a new phase of leadership development, and lo and behold, staff told stories of how their manager, whenever they knock on their office door, he or she stops what they’re doing, comes out from behind their desk and… you guessed it… focuses totally on them and their issues.
Imagine if we conducted the leadership development program by listing the behaviours a good leader displays and then tried to persuade them with logic and reasoning. Change is unlikely. But in this case the leaders worked things out for themselves and inspired themselves to change.
Both approaches to using stories to enhance leadership capabilities are important.
If you want to help your leaders be better storytellers, then get them along to our Storytelling for Business Leaders workshop or we can bring it to your organisation.
If you want to learn how to collect and make sense of stories as a way to change behaviours them come along to our Business Narrative workshop.
We run these workshops in Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth, or anywhere else in Australia or the world for that matter :-)
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| 24/05/08 | | Women's memories are more speech-filled than men's |
Contrary to popular belief, new research is showing that woman don't talk more than men (see here and here). They do, however, recall more of what was said than blokes when asked to recount their experiences. We must have plenty of examples or these verbatim recollections in the stories we've collected over the years.
Richard Ely and Elizabeth Ryan have just published their findings and have also surmised,
" ... women may recall more speech than men because of differences in the way boys and girls are spoken to by their parents. "Parents are more elaborative and more emotional when conversing with daughters than with sons."
Christian Jarrett reports this news at the Research Digest blog and also notes that the researchers also discovered that emotional events were more likely to be remembered with what was actually said.
Take this example, in which a participant recounted the time he accidentally injured a team-mate in baseball, and went to see if he was okay: "The coach just turns to me and says 'Get out of here you little bastard, you have done enough.' I didn't play baseball for five years after that."
This reminds me of the story Miriam Margolyes tells on Andrew Denton's show when the Queen tells her to "be quiet." It's a terrific story told by a consummate storyteller.
Ely, R., Ryan, E. (2008). Remembering talk: Individual and gender differences in reported speech. Memory, 16(4), 395-409. DOI: 10.1080/09658210801949869
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| 22/05/08 | | New Whitepaper: Three journeys—A narrative approach to successful organisational change |
David Drake (renowned narrative coach) and I have written this white paper to pull together our thinking on how to use our three journeys approach to organisational change and also add a coaching perspective. I hope you find it useful and of course feedback is welcome. Here's a little blurb.
This paper describes the approach we take with clients to successfully foster change in their organisations. It is based on our deep knowledge of both complexity and narratives, and it reflects our holistic approach in working at both systemic and personal levels to help organisations and their people move forward. Coaching is integral to our process at each step of the way and to our clients’ success in reaching their change and improvement goals. Our approach helps leaders and organisations embrace the need for change, approach it openly, prepare for it fully, and achieve the critical outcomes—whether it be a new technology, a turnaround, a new strategy or some other cause.
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| 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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| 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.
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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.
Technorati Tags: jack petranker, margaret atwood
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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
Technorati Tags: karl weick, VISA
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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 | | Stories of the past reflect what's happening today |
Les Posen sent me this article (“This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It)” by Benedict Carey) from the New York Times (might require a login) about how we construct our life stories. One of the question I often get asked is “by collecting stories aren't you just finding out what happened in the past? How does that relate to what's happening now?” This paragraph from the article helps us understand that whatever story we tell about the past is a reflection of what's happening now.
In analyzing the texts, the researchers found strong correlations between the content of people's current lives and the stories they tell. Those with mood problems have many good memories, but these scenes are usually tainted by some dark detail. The pride of college graduation is spoiled when a friend makes a cutting remark. The wedding party was wonderful until the best man collapsed from drink. A note of disappointment seems to close each narrative phrase.
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| 19/05/07 | | Anecdote News - May 2007 |
** Anecdote News **
Brought to you by Anecdote - Putting Stories to Work
http://www.anecdote.com.au
Discovering lost knowledge
Clients often ask us to suggest tangible ways to minimise
the impact of people leaving their organisation. The exodus
might be due to people retiring or in the case of one
organisation, people leave because the culture says
“you need to move positions to show your career is progressing.”
In one case everyone in a regional outpost was new to the job
leaving the team of 16 without a good understanding of the
work that has been done in the 15 years their group has been
operating. To be effective this regional group needs to know
about the scientific studies that have occurred in their region.
To re-find this knowledge the group is planning to invite past
employees to a world cafe. But because the current team is
new and they only know some of the past employees, they are going
to ask the people they know to name others they should invite and so
on until they get as many names as possible.
The event will be part reunion and part world cafe where
small tables will be manned by a person from the current team
and past employees will join each table and talk about the projects
they remember were done in the region. All the ideas are captured
on butcher's paper tablecloth and the visitors rotate to the next table
where their table facilitator fills them in on the conversation that's
happened so far prompting people to remember new projects.
Questions that elicit stories
We've written quite a bit on how to elicit stories and the questions you
should ask, and the ones to avoid.
- Questions to elicit stories
- Crafting good anecdote circle questions
- How Do You Create Story-Eliciting Questions?
One of the things we said is, “use 'when' and 'where' questions and
avoid 'how' and 'what' questions.” Questions like “When have you
been inspired at work?” tend to elicit stories. While questions like,
“What do you think about your work?” tends to elicit abstract opinions.
There is an exception that always bothered me. The simple question,
“What happened?” This is a great story collecting question. Well it hit me
yesterday while listening to a talkback radio host, Richard Stubbs. His
show is all about eliciting stories from his listeners and yesterday he
wanted stories about the things people achieved this week and he
simply asked, “What did you do?”
So 'what' questions that focus on actions elicit stories. Other 'what'
questions such as “What do you think?” or “What do you feel?” will
likely result in opinions.
========
If you enjoy Anecdote News, please forward it to
friends and colleagues. It comes to you every Month
from learning and change consultants and corporate
anthropologist Anecdote. You can sign up for this newsletter at:
http://www.anecdote.com.au/subscribe.php
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| 29/04/07 | | Making sense of stories |
A couple of weeks ago I was helping to run a management development program. It was based on the collection and interpretation of stories of good and bad management behaviour. Everytime we run this program (which happens every month for this organisation) I’m always impressed with the conversations people have and the level of understanding that develops. Stories have many possible interpretations and the story-listerners hear different things depending on their own history and interests. I think partcipants of these story-based processes gain four benefits:
- They recognise their own behaviour in the stories and become more self aware. Self wareness is the pre-condition for change. I had one manager say to me, “this story is just like me and I’m not proud of it.”
- They develop an appreciation of how their colleagues view the world and just how different that view can be to their own.
- They learn stories that they can retell. The stories that really resonate will be retold and will affect the organisation’s culture.
- It helps adjust what people believe is possible. One participant said he was unaware of how the company dealt with a particular personal tragedy until he heard the story and he now felt he had a understanding of how he might respond to a similar incident if it happens
Using stories to trigger conversations and intepretations of behaviours is powerful. David Maister gives us a good example in a recent podcast. In this case David recounts how he received advice from a manager when he was a young professor at Harvard. What’s interesting about this story is the conversation David facilitates after its telling. Even without being there I was thinking of my own interpretations of the story which helps me remember what happened and some of the lessons. Managers everwhere should adopt this strategy of presenting a story and then getting the team to talk and make sense of it.
You might be thinking, “yeh, but isn’t that the same as case studies? We’ve been doing that for years.” The problem with case studies is they typically suck the life out of whatever they are describing by removing specifics which we all love to hear in a story (I’ve talked about case studies before here). On Friday I was in at the National Australia Bank getting a coffee at the staff kitchen and on the wall were eight one page case studies of how the bank helped a range of unnamed customers. I read the first one and immediately felt my skeptometer rising. I’m sure they are all true but all the details were missing (real people’s names, names of organisations, dates) that would help me ascertain their plausibility (a key element of a story). I supect they are rarely referred to.
Are managers in your organisation recounting stories and asking people for their interpretation?
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| 26/04/07 | | Corporate or business anthropologist? |
People are intrigued by the work we do at Anecdote. When they hear how we use stories in a business setting they often mistakenly think we are helping leaders tell better stories. Most of the time we leave that side of the discipline of business narrative to the Steve Dennings of this world. We help organisations collect and make sense of their stories. We’ve called this story-listening.
When people ask, “so what do you call yourself then Shawn?” I sometimes respond, half jokingly, by saying I’m a corporate anthropologist. Some people laugh, others love the idea. As with any title, it’s not entirely accurate. The traditional anthropologist or ethnographer makes observations and then interprets them. This interpretation becomes an expert’s opinion. This article is a good example of the expert ethnographer at work in a business setting.
We also observe but more often than not we coach the organisation to observe things for themselves, and more importantly we help a group of people, representing the stakeholders that might be affected by any planned improvements, interpret these observations. Of course the observations are collected in the form of stories.
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| 14/04/07 | | Why managers shun management books |
Have you ever noticed that experienced managers rarely read management books? At first I though this might be because they don’t have the time or just don’t like reading. Yet many are voracious newspaper readers. They will get up early in the morning to get through one or more newspapers.
Here’s one explanation. Most management books provide a set of rules in the form, “for this type of behaviour, involving these types of people, in this type of situation, do this.” The problem with these types of rules is they can only be generalisations and when things move fast, and they’re complex, progress can only be effectively made with knowledge of specific situations. In the moment these specific situations (experience) help the manager create new generalisations made for the current situation. This context-specific knowledge is a combination of understanding what happened to get here, what’s happening now and what the manager (and the group) would like to see happen. This specific and detailed understanding comes from stories. Stories from the manager’s experience, from her colleagues, the people involved in the situation and those who want to make progress.
So why do managers read papers and avoid management books? Because newspapers contain stories of what’s happening now, in the past and in the future. They are detailed and specific and help build a manager’s situational awareness, their repertoire and their ability to act.
Management authors are beginning to wake up to what practitioners want and are now writing books replete with stories and even advocating the need to understand and work with stories in business. A quick browse in Amazon’s top selling management books and I can see four books that illustrate this point: Blink, Made to Stick, A Whole New Mind, The No Asshole Rule.
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| 11/04/07 | | Lessons learning: getting your colleagues to tell their stories |
One of the best ways to share knowledge in an organisation is to put people who wouldn’t normally work together on the same project. On projects people have time to get to know one another, have real problems to apply their knowledge and see their colleague’s knowledge in action. Learning (which is the same as knowledge sharing) occurs when there is time (or you make time) for reflection, when you and colleagues have time to discuss what happened. The project approach to knowledge sharing is the basis for the action-oriented community of practice model.
Despite the time we spend with our colleagues on projects, we waste the opportunity to learn from them. We rarely ask them about their experiences and elicit their stories. “Just give me the facts,” seems to be the project mantra. But hearing someone else’s story is the next best thing to experiencing something for ourselves. If we don’t seek our our colleague’s experiences we are missing a huge opportunity.
There’s one good reason why we don’t typically hear our colleagues stories: as a general rule we don’t ask the type of questions that prompts stories.
Everyone should develop a story eliciting competency. Organisational learning would sky-rocket if we all had it. It’s simple really. When your experienced colleague suggests a way forward, makes a decision, starts to apply their knowledge, simply ask them: you look like you’ve done something like this before. What happened last time?
If you’re lucky they will tell you a story of how they tackled a similar problem but I’ve found that really experienced people tend to encapsulate their experience into pithy aphorisms, rules of thumb and principles and will likely tell you these in the first instance. You must be persistent. “Can you recall a specific moment from your experience that would help me visualise the situation?” Here are a bunch of questions (and here, and here) you should have up your sleeve in preparation for encourage storytelling.
Sometimes the experienced practitioner will be a reluctant storyteller because that’s not the way we talk at work. You need to show you’re interested in her experiences. Genuine interest will also help them feel comfortable in telling you the whole story and perhaps even the things went badly that they would never do again.
I’m certain that the skill to elicit stories from colleagues, especially colleagues more experienced than yourself, will become an essential lessons learning competency as the world becomes even more complex. Stories provide the details from which we extract and remember principles and principles help us deal with totally new situations.
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| 9/04/07 | | Lessons learning: context matters |
Yesterday I posted a piece on how taking a story out of context is unlikely to help lessons learning. One of my regular commenters, Ken (I would love to know who you are), posted this link to a beautiful article in the Washington Post that sums up this issue of context. You will love it.
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| 8/04/07 | | Lessons learning: using stories to share understanding |
This morning (Happy Easter!) I started writing a paper on a narrative approach to lessons learning. I’m at the point of gathering my thoughts and had the idea of sharing some of them as they occur to me. I hope it’s not too ill-informed but if that’s the case I’m hoping you’ll help me correct my wayward thinking.
The paper I’m writing argues against merely capturing stories as a way to share lessons. I thought I would start the paper by reflecting on the nature of narrative in order to build a case against the database-only approach (notice how I qualify these statements about capturing and databases because I do believe they play a role).
Stories are told in context
Stories are told in context to illustrate a point. No one wants to tell a story to have the listeners cock they heads and say , “huh?” The story makes sense in relation to what came before and what is likely to follow. It also makes sense in terms of who is in the conversation and the collective identity of the group. A story in isolation is likely to require active interpretation—what did she mean here? A story in context is hardly noticed and usually makes sense immediately. Perhaps the real danger of an isolated story is that its original intention can be misunderstood. Perhaps even reversed. For example, people often quote Robert Frost’s Mending Wall advocating for barriers, saying “Good fences make good neighbors”, yet when you read the entire poem (in context) you realise Frost is questioning the need for fences.
Here is an anecdote I told last week—without context.
When we started ActKM each person on the organising committee had a title: president, secretary, treasurer, etc. After a while we heard that members felt obliged to seek our permission to kick off any new initiative and there was also some suspicion about what this group was doing. The members felt it was a closed shop. Once we realised what was happening we discarded the formal titles and called everyone in the organising group a coordinator and the group became known as the coordinator’s group.
Take a moment to reflect on what this story means for you and see how close that meaning matches my intent when I told it.
So here’s the context. Last week I was at a meeting with John Smith, Etienne Wenger and the members of a new group of people invited to work with John and Etienne to re-energise CP2. We were talking about what this new group should be called. Before the meeting the group was called the oversight committee but intuitively John and Etienne felt that the name didn’t reflect the intent of the group. At the end of the meeting we agreed to call the group the coordination group.
Did you have a different meaning for the original story?
Now you might be thinking “gee, Shawn is really getting hung up with the meaning of the story. Surely stories are powerful because they have multiple meanings?” I agree, the multiple meanings are an important feature of narratives. Please bear with me while I take you though the next point.
There are many versions of the story I told John and the gang last week. For example if we were talking about how not to setup a community of practice I might have told a version that emphasised how we ended up with the formal titles in the first place and how our dalliances with KMCI were misguided. A different meaning.
There is more to the story than in its telling. The story listeners recreate the story as it unfolds and imbue it with their own meaning which is dependent on the way it’s told, the context of its telling and the history of the listener. The story becomes a catalyst for a group of people to make sense of a situation and choose their next steps (action).
Last week I had the pleasure of meeting David Boje. In our meeting, which was attended by 15 or so people, I made the statement that “the magic is not in the story, it’s in the interaction among people who are prompted to relate by hearing the story.” David was uncomfortable with this statement because he felt there is magic in stories. In reflection I think my wording was inaccurate. What I should have said was that “the answer is not in the story but is contained in the sensemaking that’s prompted by stories.” Storytelling is a social phenomena and we need to seek opportunities to tell one another stories, perhaps prompted by stories the have already been collected.
So hopefully I will have more for you on this topic over the coming weeks. Love to hear your thoughts.
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| 6/04/07 | | Anecdote circles don't work for everyone |
Occasionally, anecdote circles don’t work. Sometimes, people don’t get a lot out of them.
In the feedback session for the leadership program mentioned on Wednesday one of the participants had this to say:
I attended one of the anecdote circles and, no offense meant Mark, but I thought it was a bit of a waste of time. But now, when I see all these stories assembled and how we can use them and how powerful they are…well I have changed my mind – I get it now.
Yesterday I ran anecdote circles in Brisbane involving people providing services and support for the homeless. Despite them being desperately over worked and it being the last day before the Easter break, the feedback from both circles was really positive. So, while anecdote circles might not work for everyone, they seem to really work for most.
I also was to acknowledge the incredible contribution these people make. In a resource-poor sector they make a difference every day in a very confronting, emotionally demanding and sometimes dangerous job that they get paid peanuts to do.
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| 4/04/07 | | Anecdote: making positive choices |
I am in a plane to Brisbane reflecting on the second delivery of a 2.5 day leadership program we have helped develop for the Australian arm of an international company. A large part of the program used anecdotes collected from within the organisation on leadership behaviours and their impact. The feedback from the participants was great and so were they.
One of the participants reflected on an occasion when she was frustrated that the majority of her team were consistently late for meetings. Faced with many possible ways to handle the problem, what she chose to do was to send an email to the one person who was consistently on time and thanked them for always being punctual and told them how much she valued this.
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| 22/03/07 | | Shell's blue book - a fine example of storytelling |
In 2001 Shell collected a bunch of stories and put them together in a booklet now know as the Blue Book, but with the official title of Stories from the Edge: Managing Knowledge through New Ways of Working within Shell's Exploration and Production Business. It’s a landmark publication because it shows that a company in a hard-nosed industry like oil exploration and production recognises the value of storytelling and are getting benefits from its application.
The booklet (87 pages) is in four parts:
- Global Networks
- Global Consultancy
- Centres of Excellence
- Distributed Teams
Many of the stories tell how the organisation has saved money by sharing knowledge. Others are about how new tools and techniques have been used. In each case the stories are in the language of the Shell employees. Here’s an example:
Pecten Cameroon's research revealed that other operators had achieved production gains by injecting demulsifier downhole in gas lifted wells, reducing viscosity in the production string and thereby increasing production. After a trial evaluation of their own, the company obtained a gain of 500 barrels per day or $5 million per annum. The approach is being extended to 17 other wells with prospective gains of $9 million per year.
What I find most interesting about the Blue Book is how the authors recognised that collecting and sharing stories of success is a powerful way to garner resources for things like communities of practice, which are notoriously difficult to develop a business case for. In fact, any learning initiative is difficult to justify in a strictly analytical way (to see why have a look at this post I wrote a while back-Learning initiatives need stories not measurement).
BHP Billiton has taken a similar approach with their communities of practice (also called Networks). Check out their Ok Tedi story.
Throughout the Blue Book are quotes from Dave Snowden’s early papers on narrative techniques for knowledge management. I hadn’t heard about any work Dave had done with Shell so it was a welcomed surprise.
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| 18/03/07 | | Identifying a story |
I’m just in the process of building up some reflections for my workshop in Boston (you’re most welcome to register and attend) in a couple of weeks and thought I would share some snippets as I progress. You will notice some of the following text is directly from previous blog posts and some is new.
Annette Simmons says that explaining storytelling is like explaining kittens.
“We all know about kittens. We have wonderful memories of kittens—children holding kittens, watching kittens play, petting a kitten. Our memories are a meaningful whole. Trying to break them down into pieces is like cutting a kitten in half in order to understand it. Half a kitten isn’t really half a kitten. Breaking storytelling down into pieces, parts, and priorities destroys it.” (xviii)
If you go searching for explanations of stories, narrative, business narrative and storytelling, you will discover mountains of information that dissects the kitten into a million pieces. From our experience, there is one practical thing you need to know to be effective in business narrative; you must know how to identify a story.
A story is a set of events linked together in a way that explains what happened or what could happen. It differs from a clinic example because a story includes emotions and sensory detail.
“The King died and the Queen cried,” is a statement of fact.
“The King died and the Queen cried of a broken heart,” is a story.
Here’s a story from FedEx. They collect them to demonstrate employees exhibiting the company’s values.
In St. Vincent, a tractor trailer accident blocked the main road going into the airport. Together a driver and ramp agent tried every possible alternate route to the airport but were stymied by traffic jams. They eventually struck out on foot, shuttling every package the last mile to the airport for an on-time departure.
A story is detailed and specific and through these details people generalise and work out what’s happening and how to behave. When you become attuned to identifying stories, you will realised you’re surrounded by them.
Their ubiquity is due to our tendency to use stories to explain most things that happen around us. The boss comes down from the 26th floor to speak to Mary. “Jim must be down to talk to Mary about next week’s round of performance reviews.” It’s how we make sense of what’s happening.
Some people think a story must have a plot, character development, a protagonist, a turning point and a resolution. This might be true of a film script, a play, a novel etc. but in organisations, stories tend to be much smaller and inconspicuous. Stories can range from well-rehearsed retellings of a foundational moment in the organisation (the creation myths) to the smallest of utterances that immediately help people recall a story: “What happened, Fiona?” he asked. “Exactly what happened to Pedro 3 years ago,” Fiona replied. The Pedro story is replayed in everyone’s mind without anyone hearing it.
Most of the time business stories are short anecdotes recounting an event. Often these anecdotes are ephemeral, lost almost immediately after being told. Other times the anecdotes are enduring, a successful meme that is told and retold throughout the organisation. The enduring anecdotes shape the character of an organisation and are the most important stories to find.
http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2007/02/finding_success.html
Simmons, A. (2006). The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion Through the Art of Storytelling. New York, Basic Books.
Boje, D.M., D.B. Fedor, and K.M. Rowland. 1982. "Myth Making: A Qualitative Step in OD Interventions." The Journal of Applied Behavioural Science 18(1):17-28.
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| 17/03/07 | | Why use business narrative techniques? |
Whenever someone asks me this question I tell them this story.
One of our first narrative projects was to help a government department assess their occupational health and safety practices to see whether their policy and procedures were being following and to determine their training needs. We formed two teams to collect our data, one used structured interview techniques and the other collected stories. At the end of the first day of data collection both teams got together to compare notes. “Well, looks like they pretty much have things together,” said the interview team. “They seem to follow the procedures and policies quite well.” The narrative team members looked at each other in amazement. “So you didn’t hear about the guys showering in their own urine because their recycling system is faulty or how in one workshop everyone wears protective shoes because a guy chopped the top of his foot off a while back but no one wears protective eye wear?”
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| 13/03/07 | | Nature of business narrative |
Some people think a story must have a plot, character development, a protagonist, a turning point and a resolution. This might be true of a film script, a play, a novel etc. but in organisations stories tend to be much smaller and inconspicuous. Stories can range from well rehearsed retellings of a foundational moment in the organisation (the creation myths) to the smallest of utterances that immediately help people recall a story: “What happened, Fiona?” he asked. “Exactly what happened to Pedro 3 years ago,” Fiona replied. The story is replayed without anyone hearing it.
Most of the time business stories are short anecdotes recounting an event. Often these anecdotes are ephemeral, lost almost immediately after being told. Other times the anecdotes are enduring, a successful meme that is told and retold throughout the organisation. The enduring anecdotes shape the character of an organisation and are the most important stories to find.
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| 12/03/07 | | Future stories |
A simple way to help people develop stories of how their organisation might operate in the future is to ask them to consider specific triggering events then explain what happened. It’s important the triggering event is specific yet representative.
For example, a triggering event might be Ron Wilson suddenly resigning from the investments section to join a competitor. The group might decide to tell the story of what happened from the point of resignation or sometime before that.
Another approach is to find examples of how you would like your organisation to operate from within your organisation or in other similar organisations. As William Gibson says, “The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.”
So why are we interested in future stories? They help an organisation paint a memorable vision of what they would like to achieve and rooting it in specific examples that everyone can understand, recollect and retell. The provide a strategic intent for the organisation without being prescriptive.
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| 8/03/07 | | Using video to capture stories |
There are two examples on the web you should check out. 50 Lessons is a subscription video library of senior executives recounting their experiences. It’s called 50 Lessons because the original set of 50 companies they interviewed were ones that in the early ‘70s helped propel the stock market into a long bull run.
These clips are professionally produced and look great. The videos are categorised into business issues (such as change, innovation, managing people) so you can find stories that convey particular lessons. A good way to use these stories is to get a group of people together to discuss the ideas they trigger (sensemaking) and how the lesson is relevant to the circumstances of the discussion group.
There’s one shortcoming of 50 Lessons. There is no online ability to create a discussion around a particular video clip. Online discussion helps keep the content alive in an organisation. For that reason I love what they’ve done at Channel 9.
Channel 9 is a site for Microsoft technologists. It consists of video clips (which you can stream or download) taken of Microsoft engineers explaining what they are working on. It’s done with a hand held video, it’s roughly shot and edited. What’s great about this site is that anyone can view the video and make comments. You can also see how many people have viewed each clip.
Both sites provide organisations with examples of what can be done with video to share experiences. Both sites have recognised that capturing experiences as stories makes the content more engaging, and ultimately determines whether the content is ever watched again.
If you are interested in developing this capability within your organisation, give me a call.
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| 3/03/07 | | Ira Glass on the power of anecdotes |
Ira Glass in a public radio producer and host of This American Life. In this video Ira describes the anecdote as one of the two basic building blocks of a story. He also demonstrates how compelling an anecdote is to listen to regardless of the information being conveyed. It’s one of the reasons why we like to listen to stories.
The second building block is time for reflection. While Ira is commenting on crafting a story, we use a similar construct in our work when we conduct sensemaking workshops which give leaders an opportunity to see patterns in a number of anecdotes and reflect of their meaning. This proceeds the act of designing interventions.
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| 2/03/07 | | Three dimensions of story |
Several weeks ago, while preparing a presentation on the use of story in organisations. I came up with quite a long list of ways story is used, but it needed a framework. The following came to me in shower (where good ideas occasionally occur and where bad singing is commonplace). The three main dimensions of story in organisations I came up with were:
- We tell stories to make ourselves understood. Stories are powerful persuaders. Good teachers will always try to illustrate a learning point with an example or a story. We communicate strategy using story; stories help place facts in context and give them emotional impact.
- We listen to stories to understand others and to learn. Stories are an important way we remember and learn things and they often are the vehicle by which our various identities and memberships are illustrated. Much of an organisation's knowledge is contained in its stories. Story, in the form of anecdotes, are an essential part of finding out what is really going on.
- Our behavior creates and changes stories. This one came to me as an afterthought, but the more I think about it the more it seems appropraite at this level. As an example, the CEO can read out the organisation's (lengthy, important and well-written) sustainability strategy statement without any noticeable effect other than eyes glazing over. But a story gets created when he puts his hand on his heart and says "I don't want to be part of an organization that doesn't act sustainably, and I don't think you do either”. People will tell the story of the behaviour long after the words of the sustainability statement are forgotten.
There are many ways we could cut such a framework and I found this one useful for the presentation I gave. There are many other ways of looking at it and I would love to hear other views
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| 25/02/07 | | Knowledge strategy in Melbourne and Canberra |
There seems to be a renewed interest in developing knowledge strategies. We have been involved in three in the last six months and our narrative techniques have been well received. We now need to move people from seeing a knowledge strategy as a thing to a seeing it as a process. We also need to see a shift from developing knowledge strategies to engaging people in knowledge-focussed business strategies.
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| 25/02/07 | | One of the big misunderstandings about stories and tacit knowledge |
People have heard that storytelling is great for dealing with tacit knowledge. They say things like, “If we could only capture our stories we could then capture our organisation’s tacit knowledge.”
This is the big mistake! Stories only have meaning in the context of their telling. That is, you need to tell and listen to stories to transfer (not capture) tacitly held knowledge. It’s a social process. You need to be part of the conversation.
In practice, this means creating spaces for stories to be told and listened to. We do it in a bunch of different ways depending on the needs and objectives of our clients.
For example, if we are helping tackle complex issues such as trust, leadership, culture change, we would create the space in sensemaking workshops.
If we need to evaluate the impact of difficult to measure initiatives we create the space using Most Significant Change and the selection workshops.
NASA creates this space for staff to listen to and tell stories in their monthly project management seminars where PMs discuss the stories collected in the their monthly newsletter, ASK.
Everyone is busy and no one will give up their valuable time to listen and tell stories. But they will allocate time to evaluate a project, tackle a complex problem or learn lessons from their colleagues.
The stories don’t contain magical solutions that we can capture, dissect and unleash. Rather they provide a language of engagement, of learning and a way to transfer what is impossible to write down and store in any database.
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| 23/02/07 | | Email your stories and create a book |
Here’s an interesting new service described in the Springwise newsletter.
With Life Trackers, turning life experiences into a published book is as simple as sending an email. While self-publishing is nothing new, Life Trackers makes it easy to pull together travel journals, memory books and other keepsakes from just about anywhere a user has internet access. Best of all, there's no cost to join, and customers can get a printable PDF of their book for free.
Could have application for story collection. Imagine if every employee had an account, or project team members, and they sent in their work experiences. What a resource!
Related post: Story telling versus story writing
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| 19/02/07 | | Business narrative workshops in Seattle and Boston |
Just a reminder that the early bird rate for these workshops closes in 1 week. Here is a description of the workshop. The full description and registration details can be found here.
- What's really going on in your organisation?
- What are the touch points where small changes can transform behaviour and morale?
- How can you access and transfer the wisdom of your workforce to future employees?
Surveys and metrics can uncover trouble in an organisation, but they usually don't help you identify the reasons for dysfunctions, let alone point the way toward remedies for the problems. Instead, learn to use stories as listening posts. From time immemorial, stories have contained collective lessons in condensed form. When gathered and examined, stories that are told in your organisation reveal important themes and patterns that in turn indicate effective solutions.
This one-day workshop, led by Australia's leading expert in story listening, teaches you to gather and analyse stories so as to see revealing patterns and use them to gain traction on solving messy organisational problems or reaching complicated goals.
After a full day of instruction, practice and feedback, you will have the confidence and knowledge to apply these powerful techniques within your organisation.
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| 19/02/07 | | Using stories to retain and keep alive retiring employees' knowledge |
I should have mentioned this earlier but this Friday (23rd February) I will be presenting a workshop in Sydney on how to use stories to retain and keep alive retiring employees’ knowledge. It will be a practical session where the participants will have fun crafting questions to elicit stories, conduct interviews, facilitate anecdote circles and then use a couple techniques to help make sense of the stories. Communities of practice will feature.
The two key messages I’m hoping to convey in the workshop are:
- communities keep stories alive
- lessons from a few stories collected once are fun and interesting; lessons from many stories reviewed widely and regularly nurtures wisdom
This workshop is a post-conference event for Extracting and Sharing Knowledge from an Ageing Workforce conference. To receive a full copy of the brochure for this event please email Louise at louise.badcock@keyforums.com.au or call on +61 2 9436 4255.
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| 19/02/07 | | Anecdote newsletter February 2007 |
This newsletter was sent to our subscribers a week ago. If you would like to receive this information with all the other of our newsletter subscribers, just go here. I’ve also created a new category ‘newsletter’ so you will be able to view all the newsletters we send out in the future.
Good morning,
I have just discovered an excellent exercise you can try with your colleagues, clients and loved ones. I’ve used it a couple of times this week and people get it. It’s called ‘tappers and listeners’ and is one of the many engaging stories in Dan and Chip Heath’s new book, Made to Stick. Here’s how it works. Ask your audience to participate with you in a little game. You will tap out a song with your fingers or a pencil and you ask the audience to guess the song. Pick two songs everyone knows well—I was using Happy Birthday to Me and Advance Australia Fair. Most people are unable to guess correctly, though Happy Birthday is a lot easier than Advanced Australia Fair. In fact, Elizabeth Newton, a PhD researcher from Stanford, found that, on average, only 2.5% of the listeners she tested could guess the song. But here is the rub. When she asked her tappers how likely it was for the listeners to guess correctly, they expected the listeners to get is right 50% of the time. The tapper has the song in their head and can hear it as clear as a bell. They are cursed with their own knowledge and expect everyone else to hear it as easily as they do. Every communication suffers from the same dynamic and this newsletter is no exception. I’ll do my best to fill in the taps with a few melodic whistles.
With that said, welcome to our first newsletter for 2007. We hope you have had a good holiday break and are have broken all your new year’s resolutions :-). It has been a fast start for us being busy getting ready for our workshops in the USA, helping a community of chocolate experts see their social networks, coaching a Paris-based CFO on storytelling, using stories in a leadership development program, and leading a change management initiative in support of an IT implementation. All this activity might make us tired if we didn’t love our work so much.
We were going to have a theme for this newsletter like ‘Doing knowledge strategies’ or ‘Getting a community of practice started’ but some other tidbits of interesting information appeared that we thought you might like (as an aside, Shawn has written a 3-pager on how to start a community of practice and if you would like a copy, just sent him an email-shawn@anecdote.com.au). Why don’t we start with a mystery story?
Why should we care about mystery stories?
Robert Cialdini discovered a secret to learning in 2005. As a world-leading psychologist he was surprised he didn’t already know this secret but now swears by it. He was researching a new psychology book we wanted to write for a general audience and wanted to know the characteristics of effective science writing for an informed public readership. Most of his review confirmed what he already knew: must have a clear and focussed point, well written, concrete examples. The big surprise for Robert was that the best examples where written in the format of a mystery story.
Robert’s laboratory is his classroom so he tried out the approach there. A typical lecture, before using the mystery story format, would end with his students starting to pack up five minutes before the lecture’s scheduled finishing time. When he presented the same information as a mystery story, and he was yet to reveal the who’d dunnit, the students remained totally engaged and didn’t move, even after the lecture was supposed to have finished. It was like magic.
So here is the structure Cialdini discovered in his review and then wrote up in volume 24 of the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.
- Pose the mystery
- Deepen the mystery
- Home in on the proper explanation by considering (and offering evidence against) alternative explanations
- Provide a clue to the proper explanation
- Resolve the mystery
- Draw the implications for the phenomenon under study
To test this out I wrote a blog post using the mystery format called ‘What is happening to Melbourne's trains?’ I would be grateful to receive your feedback. Just leave comments on the blog post.
Cialdini, R. B. (2005). “What’s The Best Secret Device for Engaging Student Interest? The Answer Is In The Title.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 24(1): 22-29.
How to find great stories to retell
Telling a story is an effective way to spark action, convey values and communicate ideas. Facts alone are insufficient. So how do you find great stories to tell? How much detail do you include? What do you leave out? What is the best way to present your story?
Our storytelling process is a simple set of activities to help you find relevant and powerful stories, help you decide how to construct your stories, and suggests a set of tips for the best possible storytelling.
The best stories to tell are your own stories. You know them. They're real. And hopefully they'll sound real. Authenticity and plausibility are hallmarks of successful business storytelling. The starting point is to become aware of just how effective stories are in communicating ideas and sparking action. Before you have this awareness interesting things will happen and you will barely notice them as great material. You need to become mindful and take note of your experiences. A good way to do this is to search through your personal history for remarkable events. This search is harder than it sounds because we need prompting to remember our past. Therefore, a good way to make progress is to enlist the help of a provocateur, an interviewer.
In eliciting stories from an individual, the role of the interviewer is to help you remember what you know.
What Does The Interviewer Need To Do?
The interviewer's job is to create a relaxed, conversational environment that helps you remember your past in a way that encourages a candid response. They need to put you at ease, listen to what you say and really care about the conversation. If you sense the interviewer does not care or is distracted you are less likely to reveal your experiences.
The reason why you would want to reveal your experiences is that it will help you remember other experiences. The more stories you retell to the interviewer, the more aware you become of your own stories and the number of potential stories for retelling increases.
The following approach is for conducting one-on-one interviews. If you have a group of people who you would like to share their experiences, we suggest you read the Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles
One-on-one interviews can be quite arduous for the interviewer. The interviewer is under pressure to keep the conversation going while trying to remain focussed on what the interviewee is saying, keenly observing possibilities for unearthing new and interesting stories. Consequently, they need to do their homework and be prepared.
What Does Doing The Homework Involve?
The interviewer needs to know the interviewee's important life/business events. What jobs has she held? What projects has she been on? What roles has she performed? Whom has she worked with? How long has she been with the organisation? The interviewer needs to collect as much information as they can in order to pinpoint important events and relationships that might form the basis of questions.
How Do You Work Out Which Themes To Explore?
It’s impossible to garner every story from a person’s life so a substantial amount of selection is required before you start. Selecting a few themes to explore is a good approach. Three themes are usually enough for a 90-minute interview. I suggest you choose the themes based on the ideas you wish to convey in the stories. The themes will influence the questions that we will create to elicit the stories.
Simply brainstorming the themes is an effective approach.
How Do You Create Story-Eliciting Questions?
We have outlined a process for creating story-eliciting questions in the Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles. In addition to this resource, here are some further suggestions:
Start with the simplest and least confronting questions. The following format can be a useful way to get started:
"You started in the HR department in 1995. What was it like when you started?"
This type of question gets people in the right mindset to reminisce. Another way to phrase this context-setting question is to ask:
"What was the HR department like when you worked there?"
After you get your subject talking you can then get into asking your meatier questions. Don't forget: one question at a time, relish silence and listen carefully.
Colton et. al. (2006) provide some excellent example question templates.
- “Tell me about a time when ...” “Tell me about a moment when ...”
- “you or your project faced a dilemma in a project
- “you or your team experienced a significant turning point
- “you dealt with a real crisis on a project. What happened before, during and after it?
- “you felt really proud to be part of something
- “you took a real risk and it paid off or didn't pay off
- “you were really inspired by what was going on around you
- “you encountered an obstacle and overcome it
- “you saw (one of your organisation's values) really brought to life/being acted out
- “your partnerships were working really well
- “you saw positive changes happen as a result of your work
Throughout the interview, you will need to adapt and respond to the stories being told. Colton et. al. (2006) provide some common situations and possible responses.
Setting the scene: “I’d like to hear you tell your story in your own words, to get under the skin of it.” “Are your ready to start?” “Take a moment to think back …”
Beginning: “So tell me about how you first got involved with/ met/ starting doing X?” “How did it begin?”
When things are too general: “What were some of the memorable moments?” or “for instance?” or “can you give me an example, so I can picture it?”
Qualifying the difference: “Can you pinpoint a time when you really saw you were making a difference?” “What did that feel like?”
Engaging emotions, finding turning points: “Can you remember a particularly magic or moving moment? One that really sticks in your mind?” plus follow-up comments like “what did that feel like?” or “you must have been proud to be part of it”.
Audiences and messages: “Who should hear this story?” “If you were telling this story to X what key messages would you want them to take away?”
Catchy title: “Hearing you tell your story I listened for nice turns of phrases. But if this story were a book, what would its title be" Can I suggest X?” Note: this is a really important part of the process. Titles should contain the essence of the story and make it really memorable. People also appreciate you playing back their words--it makes them feel both heard and creative.
Digging deeper: The best results were when we reflected back saying things like "so it sounds like you really had your work cut out ..." etc.
Direct and indirect: Direct questions can sound quite intimidating and block people: “Were you frightened?” Whereas indirect questions can prompt deeper recall and develop empathy” “It sounds like that might have been quite frightening for you?”
Interrupting: Interrupting, to check facts or to express surprise can send people off in a different direction to the story they wanted to tell. Containing your surprise is important to prevent diversion from the original direction.
Silence: Holding long pauses feels unnatural but allows the story to unfold.
What Other Ways Can An Interviewer Help A Subject Reminisce?
On our blog, we reported on a project that aims to help the elderly reminisce as a form of therapy. This reminisicience work has many good ideas for memory triggers to help people recall their stories.
Related Blog Posts & Whitepapers From Anecdote
- Some more words to elicit stories
- The difference between a sound argument and a good story
- Which story-based techniques are most used?
- Story telling versus story writing
- Telling stories for a living
- Building trust and rapport in Anecdote circles
For our readers in North America – Narrative Techniques for Business workshops in Seattle and Boston (end of March)
There are only a couple of weeks left to register and receive the early bird discount for our Narrative Techniques for Business workshops. If you are interested in getting hands-on experience with our techniques simply check our the workshop description and send me an email requesting a registration form.
Social network analysis workshop in Melbourne
On the 22nd and 23rd March Andrew will be running a 2 day workshops titled “Practical Social Network Analysis: Skills and techniques for facilitating organisational change.”
This workshop is for those looking to:
- Build their confidence and expertise in applying the theory and practice of social network analysis for facilitating change
- Gain an understanding of the key concepts and models which inform the practice of social network analysis and sensemaking for change in organisations
- Gain enhanced understanding and capability to use and apply the specific software tools for conducting social network investigations within your organisation
As a special offer, the first 5 participants to register for this course will receive a free copy of Rob Cross’ book “The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations.” Regarded as one of the most practical and comprehensive guides written to the application of social network analysis within organisations.
To find out more about this course including how to register simply down load the registration brochure here: http://www.anecdote.com.au/files/Social_network_analysis.pdf
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| 14/02/07 | | Finding success stories |
Have you ever been asked to find success stories and been unsure where to start? Done well success stories slide effortlessly from one teller to the next conveying company values, strategic directions and the good reasons why your company should invest in initiatives like communities of practice. Done badly the stories remain captive and moribund in content management jails.
What is a success story?
We have all heard the term ‘success story’ but what are we really talking about? First let’s take a look at a few examples.
In their Change This manifesto, Talking Strategy, Chip and Dan Heath retell this story from FedEx, the company that promises to deliver your package “absolutely, positively” overnight.
In St. Vincent, a tractor trailer accident blocked the main road going into the airport. Together a driver and ramp agent tried every possible alternate route to the airport but were stymied by traffic jams. They eventually struck out on foot, shuttling every package the last mile to the airport for an on-time departure.
Here is one from SCORE—the counsellor's to America’s small business.
Judith Moore, a lifetime baker, was on a quest to find the “perfect” chocolate chip cookie recipe. Her son-in-law thought she should start her own business.
“I started investigating what it would take to start a cookie company,” she says. Charlie Elberson, who owns an advertising agency, offered to develop a brand identity for her. In return, Judith would supply him with free cookies for a year.
Judith next contacted Coast SCORE in North Charleston, S.C., for advice on her business plan. SCORE Counselor Greg Kopatch helped her focus her vision. Greg also recommended that she create a spreadsheet and produce cash flow projections for three years of business.
His encouragement and enthusiasm helped to keep Judith going forward. “I could not have accomplished this much without SCORE’s help,” she says. Greg’s guidance was crucial to the completion of Judith’s business plan, as well as the necessary financial data to support it.
Greg continues to advise Judith on her ongoing business and its structure, business management and growth. And, it’s been a recipe for success. Judith recently entered into a new partnership with Dean & Deluca, a retail and catalogue gourmet food company based in New York City.
“It’s been a pleasure working with Greg, and a thrill to have all that information available to a small business, like we are, at no cost,” Judith says. “Having the expertise of SCORE counsellors is invaluable!”
And finally here is an example of a success story from Sun Microsystems.
SIM University (UniSIM) has to operate in a different manner than other educational institutions — the curricula, modules, programs, and even classes have to be flexible to enable students to strike a balance between work and study. The university recognised that it has to invest in its IT infrastructure to efficiently manage and operate an online e-learning solution to give its students a flexible learning environment. “Since we have decided to implement the e-learning infrastructure, it is increasingly critical that the system that supports this remains highly available and that the archives are easily managed,” says Gary Teo, Senior Manager of Educational Technology and Production for UniSIM. “We have to have systems that are always available so that our students can log in anytime, anywhere. We need something that is robust, stable and scalable. Most importantly, it must be cost-effective and highly reliable, which is why we turned to Sun.”
With almost everything online, learning becomes more flexible and interactive as students can now submit their assignments online, chat with their tutors and peers, download course materials online and even watch lectures online — from the comfort of their homes or wherever they happen to be. “We knew we made the right choice to go with Sun when the company took these seemingly irreconcilable requirements, customized them, and set up our infrastructure within a very short time,” adds Teo. “We are all very impressed.”
In order to run the Blackboard Academic Suite, the school put together an array of high-performance Sun products, including a storage area network (SAN) to house its mammoth database of lecture materials and administrative documents. To minimize the need for staff to manage the system, UniSIM acquired high-performance Sun Fire T2000 servers for high availability and automated recovery, and a Sun Fire X4100 server to support video streaming applications. To manage its database, UniSIM chose the Sun Fire V890 server. UniSIM’s critical storage and archive systems runs on a Sun StorageTek 6130 Storage Array and Sun StorageTek C2 Autoloader. As a result, UniSIM is now set for future archive expansion with additional arrays that can easily be added seamlessly.
Success stories come in all shapes and sizes but they share the trait of wishing to communicate, “look at us, look how clever, persistent, innovative [insert positive characteristic] we are.” But that’s where the similarities end. The FedEx story can be told and retold—it’s an oral story. The cookie story is more like a journalist’s version of a ‘story’. Sun Microsystem’s is more like a case study. These three examples are a microcosm of the possibilities.
Most organisation have had experience writing case studies and commissioning journalists to write pieces for their corporate newsletters. As such, I would like to focus on the characteristics of oral stories and how to find them.
The first thing to notice about an oral story is their length. They’re short; an anecdote. While there are examples of storytellers retelling epics like Homer’s Iliad, mere mortals like us find it difficult to remember really long stories. A good oral success story is memorable. Its short length helps but there are more important features that make a story memorable.
People remember concrete details that create a picture of what’s happening in our mind’s eye. What did you see when you read the FedEx story? Did you see anything while reading the cookies or Sun stories? If the story recounts events we’ve seen before—airports, delivery truck, traffic jams—we can picture the story and it’s memorable. We simply replay the pictures to remember the story. If the scene is unfamiliar other devices are needed such as analogies, similes and metaphors. But, beware of the dead metaphor.
A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves (George Orwell, Politics and the English Language)
Or as F. Scott Fitzgerald noted: “The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned ‘character’ leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de Boulogue.” The Great Gatsby.
But this is not an essay on writing. We just want to be in a position to identify good success stories when and where we hear them. Some of the other characteristics to look out for include:
- a hero overcoming adversity
- detailed and concrete rather than vague and abstract
- simple and clear
- and most importantly, authentic and plausible
BHP Billiton, one of the world’s largest resources companies, justified its significant investments in communities of practice through the collection and retelling of success stories. They purposely created two versions of the same story: an oral retelling and a case study replete with detailed graphs showing savings, increased quality and reduced downtimes. Their most successful story is the rope shovel story. Here is how it was told to me.
In Ok Tedi there was a rope shovel, the largest moving machine on the planet, that was up and running 63% of the time. The very same type of rope shovel in a mine in Santiago had very little downtime by comparison and the Global Maintenance Network (the internal CoP for maintenance) wondered why. So they sent a team from Ok Tedi to Santiago to find out. After a few weeks with their colleagues in Santiago, they worked out that lubricant cleanliness made the difference. After changing their practices at Ok Tedi their rope shovel gradually improved its availability over a five year period saving BHP Billiton more than a million US dollars every year. And that was just one thing the Global Maintenance Network has done.
The details might be wrong but the message remains intact. The Global Maintenance Network is helping members improve their practices and saving the company significant money.
We could improve this success story by finding out the names of people who were involved and then tell it from their perspective. Some dates would make the story more concrete and verifiable. An analogy might help those of us who haven’t seen a rope shovel. I know its big, but how big? How about, a rope shovel would barely fit into the MCG and could be seen poking out above the stadium and be mistaken for an additional lighting tower. I guess this only works for Australians, but football stadium comparisons are always effective.
One last story before we look at how we find these examples.
Ruby S. presented with lower abdominal pain. She was tender in the right iliac fossa, and was therefore operated on as acute appendicitis. On opening the peritoneum there was a smear of turbid fluid, but the appendix was normal. Loop after loop of small bowel was pulled out, much to the irritation of the registrar, and there, in the upper jejunum, was a toothpick sticking through the wall. (Cox, 2001)
This story illustrates the effectiveness of an unexpected ending, the power of specific and visual language (loop after loop), and the need to use the language of the intended reader.
How do you find success stories?
The first step is to know what you’re after. Who are you trying to impress? What do they value? What is your purpose? Kathy Sierra recently posted a request for success stories which shows a woman who knows what she’s after.
The overall point is to find success stories about people whose lives have been affected by the web or software apps. I'm particularly interested in places where there is an intersection between live (face-to-face) interaction and online interaction (like people who've met online then forge off-line relationships). But even purely online experiences are important to me as well.
So here’s the first strategy. Ask for success strategies. This approach works when you have a large group of people listening. Kathy Sierra certainly has a large audience being one of the most popular bloggers in the world. You might have a similarly popular communication channel like a well-used intranet, email lists, or newsletters. But in large organisations this if often not an option. Broadcast communication channels are carefully guarded.
A good plan ‘B’ is to go to your social networks. Who are the connectors and mavens who know what is going on in the organisation? If you don’t have a well established network, I suggest you seek out roles that tend to be performed by natural connectors.
- Personal assistants
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Professional association leaders
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Community of practice leaders
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Union reps
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Successful business developers (connectors outside the organisation)
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Good (internal) head-hunters
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People who travel around the organisation
Social network experts say that we’re most effective in finding the people we are seeking by first exploring likely physical locations. “We need stories that illustrate good safety behaviours. Where are some of our most dangerous operations? Don’t we have operations the Ukrainian Donbas?” The next place we should look is in the organisational structure. “Our mine operations people will have some good stories. The coal division would be a good place to start. Who heads up that division?” In combination with getting to know the company’s connectors you should be able to pin point a plethora of possibilities.
A way to use oral stories to target case studies
Many companies are obsessed with writing customer case studies. The Sun Microsystem example above gives you a feeling for what these case studies look like. When I worked at IBM we had an extensive case study database. These systems cost a fortune to maintain. And I have to tell you, I’ve never really found them that useful. I suspect because each case study requires so much effort to compile they are never done well. Here is an approach inspired by what I learned when I ran a photographic library.
Our photo library had over 100,000 photos. All the images were transparencies ranging from 35mm to large formats. It was impossible for us to catalogue the entire collection with the resources at our disposal. So we developed a general understanding of where groups of slides were physically located (which slide box) and when we sold a picture we catalogued it.
Oral success stories could represent an organisation’s first attempt at recording a success story. It’s essential that the oral story can be easily retold, just like the FedEx van driver story above. Some stories will be what Dan and Chip Heath call ‘sticky’, that is, they will be told and retold and eventually there will be a queue of people wanting the full case study. This is the signal to investigate and report the full story enabling a wisdom of crowds prioritisation of which case studies get written up and when.
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| 13/02/07 | | Truth or verisimilitude in story work |
The Master gave his teaching in parables and stories which his disciples listened to with pleasure – and occasional frustration, for they longed for something deeper.
The Master was unmoved. To all their objections he would say, ‘You have yet to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between a human being and Truth is a story’.
Anthony De Mello, One Minute Wisdom
Now this opens up a whole can of worms because if you take Bruner’s concept of a narrative mode of thinking, then the objective is not truth but verisimilitude.
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| 2/02/07 | | Some more words to elicit stories |
Last month I listed 10 questions you might use to help people recall their experiences (stories). I was chatting to Paul Atkins (executive coach and leadership expert based in Canberra) the other day and he mentioned that the subject-object interview developed by Harvard professor, Robert Kegan, also featured emotional words designed to elicit stories. Here are some of the words Paul uses when doing a subject-object interview.
- angry
- proud
- torn
- change
- delight
- success
- conviction
- strong stand
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| 28/01/07 | | Organisational stories |
A friend of a friend of our is a frequent business traveller. Let’s call him Dave. Dave was recently in Atlantic City for an important meeting with clients. Afterward, he had some time to kill before his flight, so he went to a local bar for a drink.
He’d just finished one drink when an attractive woman approached and asked if she could buy him another. He was surprised but flattered. Sure, he said. The woman walked to the bar and brought back two more drinks—one for her and one for him. He thanked her and took a sip. And that was the last thing he remembered.
Rather, that was the last think he remembered until he woke up, disoriented, lying in a hotel bathtub, his body submerged in ice.
He looked around frantically, trying to figure out where he was and how he got there. Then he spotted the note:
DON’T MOVE. CALL 911.
A cell phone rested in a small table beside the bathtub. He picked it up and called 911, his fingers numb and clumsy from the ice. The operator seemed oddly familiar with this situation. She said, “Sir, I want you to reach behind you, slowly and carefully. Is there a tube protruding from your lower back?”
Anxious , he felt around behind him. Sure enough, there was a tube.
The operator said, “Sir, don’t panic, but one of your kidneys has been harvested. There’s a ring of organ thieves operating in this city, and they got to you. Paramedics are on their way. Don’t move until they arrive.”
According to Chip and Dan Heath, this is one of the most successful urban myths. I hadn’t heard it before but I found myself retelling the story to my wife that afternoon. Chip and Dan use this story as an example of why some ideas travel and others don’t in their excellent book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
This got me thinking about the myths I hear in organisations. By myths I mean stories of larger than life characters that convey beliefs. They might be creation stories (how the organisation or community got started), heroic acts, tragedies, or amusing anecdotes that are frequently recounted.
Here’s one I heard the other day.
Our company has just done the mission, vision, values thing. The CEO, who came to us from one of our competitors, did most of the work. He went home on Friday, dug out the mission, vision and values statement from his old job, photocopied them on A3 sheets of paper and stuck them all over the wall on levels 22, 23 and 24.
Finding an organisation’s myths helps you understand the boundaries and constraints for any new interventions you might have planned. I’ve discovered that myth discovery is simply a matter of asking for stories that lots of people know. I was chatting to Dave Snowden about this last week and he suggested that you could also discover myths using his Sensemaker software by looking our for clusters of stories around particular archetypes. More on Sensemaker in a following post.
Let me leave you with one more myth from an organisation.
A new sales guys, Mike, starts at a Sydney company and he’s eager to make an impact. His boss says that the sales team in meeting in Jervis Bay (a coastal holiday spot about 3 hours drive from Sydney) on Monday morning at 9am. Mike gets up at 4am on Monday and drives down to Jervis Bay and on arrival calls his boss to get the specific location of the meeting.
On getting the call the boss says, “No, no, we are meeting in the Sydney office in a meeting room called Jervis Bay.”
What’s interesting about this seemingly innocuous story was how often we heard it told. I think it was an important story for the organisation that reminded people to ask questions and not just leap into things.
What myths are you aware of being told in your organisation?
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| 24/01/07 | | Carnival of the Capitalists on David Maister's blog |
Last week David Maister invited his blog readers to participate in the Carnival of the Capitalist and submit a blog post that his readers might enjoy. David organised the posts into six categories and I was thrilled to see our post (The Hierarchy of Explanation) topped his list in the category “Articles I Enjoyed the Most”. It’s worth popping over to David’s blog and checking out some of the carnival posts.
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| 21/01/07 | | The difference between a sound argument and a good story |
I spent a couple of hours today tracking down some papers for a course I’m helping to teach at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University on business narrative when I discovered this excellent paper by Tsoukas and Hatch called ‘Complex thinking, complex practice: The case for a narrative approach to organizational complexity’. I’m a bit of a fan of Hari Tsoukas’ work. Just read his paper on tacit knowledge to get an idea of what a great KM thinker he is. Anyway, there are a couple of paragraphs and a table that jumped out at me in this paper. The paper is based on two modes of thinking proposed by J. Bruner and goes on to say,
Bruner called the two modes of thought ‘logico-scientific’ (or paradigmatic) and ‘narrative’, arguing that:
the types of causality implied in the two modes are palpably different. The term then functions differently in the logical proposition ‘if x, then y’ and in the narrative recit ‘The king died, and then the queen died.’ One leads to a search for universal truth conditions, the other for likely particular connections between two events – mortal grief, suicide, foul play. (pp. 11–12)
To compare the two modes, Bruner claimed, is to understand the difference between a sound argument and a good story.
I’ve been working with engineers lately and I have been struggling to explain this whole issue of knowing the truth. Now I have some language to open the conversation up. This table elaborates this idea perfectly.
Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Tsoukas, H. and M. J. Hatch (2001). "Complex thinking, complex practice: The case for a narrative approach to organizational complexity." Human Relations 54(8): 979-1013.
Tsoukas, H. (2003). Do we really understand tacit knowledge? The Blackwell Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management. M. Easterby-Smith, M. A. Lysles and K. E. Weick, Blackwell Publishers.
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| 14/01/07 | | Let's Be Brief story writing contest |
Bob Hruzek over at Middle Zone Musings is kicking off a story writing contest tomorrow, with a difference: best story wins but it can only be six words long. Bob was inspired by Hemmingway’s shortest story: “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.” and has asked John Koetsier and I to be judges. I look forward to reading your submissions.
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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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| 9/01/07 | | Hierarchy of explaination or why narrative is becoming more important |
In 1805 William Clark notes in his expedition journal that the Mandans [a Native American tribe] believed that buffalos could be attracted to close-by hunting grounds by performing the buffalo dance. According to Clark, the hunters thought they could further increase their chances by having sexual relations with a woman who had been with a more powerful man. A bevy of buffalo appeared after three days of dancing.
Last week I spent a week with my parents at their home at Jervis Bay. My father was telling me how he had some problems with a tank of petrol recently. He had to drain his little Datsun truck of all its fuel. When I asked where he got the bad gas he said it was one of two places. “One of the service stations was being refuelled by a tanker and was probably churning up all the rubbish in the underground tanks and I happened to fill up when all that muck was floating around,” he said. “I will never fill up again if I see a tanker parked at the service station.”
You might have read the buffalo dance example and thought, “What a quaint belief. How could people believe that dancing and sexual relations improve a buffalo hunting season?” I hoping that when you read the second example you concluded what I did—we create rules of thumb for ourselves all the time based on stories we tell ourselves. The fact is, we’re all obsessed with explaining why things happen. How many have you sat in front of the TV and are assailed with pictures of car crashes on the news and you think to yourself, “He Must have been speeding, and he was probably drinking.” We need very few facts to create a plausible story.
So what happened here?
See, you are doing it again.
As I have hinted, the key to whether we adopt a story is based on its plausibility. If, based on our experiences and knowledge, the story seems plausible we’ll go with it. Closely linked to the idea of plausibility is that of trust because while a story might be plausible we need to know whether the source is trustworthy (do you trust the picture of the car in the telephone wires? Is it a setup?). Trust is a big topic which is not the point of this post but let me just say that we normally trust ourselves and what we see. Seeing is believing, right? As a side-bar, isn’t it interesting how we don’t explore all the possible stories and compare which one suits the situation the best through a rational, reductionist approach. As Gary Klein points out in Sources of Power, we grab the first thing that pops into our minds and if it is plausible then it’s good enough. A classic satisficing strategy.
OK, so here's what I mean by a hierarchy of explanation. First, I would like to suggest that some explanatory techniques are more resource intensive than others (hence a hierarchy). The most resource intensive approach for explaining what happened is ‘the scientific method’. We know this method works (of course you need to apply the right science to the right type of problem). It is a marvellous technique if you have the time and resources to develop hypotheses, craft double-blind experiments, investigate statistically significant populations and are able to wait months, no years, for the results to be published in a peer reviewed journal. OK, I might be overstating things.
Another explanatory approach is religion. It is also resource intensive requiring prayer, regular meetings, reading and understanding key texts, and a myriad of other rituals. For many, religious explanation is sufficient to understand the phenomena we encounter. I think religion is slightly less resource intensive than the scientific method but still highly resource intensive..
After scientific method and religion there is a significant drop in resource requirements for the next method people use to explain the world around them: stories. Of course scientific and religious approaches both have narrative characteristics but what I’m talking about here is the stories we create in our mind to explain what we experience. For example, we see the boss coming out of a colleague’s office: “So it looks like Doris got the promotion. She deserves it. I must remember to go to all the social events this year.” We build mini stories and from these stories we deduce rules of thumbs and make decisions. We also hear stories from others. It’s a good way to experience an event without being there. Our stories and the ones we hear guide our actions.
On the bottom of the hierarchy, with the lowest resource requirements, is intuition, or if you are a bloke you might feel more comfortable if I call it ‘gut instinct’. Using intuition we take action without even constructing a story or evaluating options. We just know what to do and find it difficult to describe how we know this is right. Intuition comes from experience. It’s not a magical capability, while it might appear to be, and it is something that can be systematically developed. Check out Gary Klein’s book on the topic: Intuition at Work: Why Developing Your Gut Instincts Will Make You Better at What You Do
So my hierarchy of explanation, according to the resources required to undertake each method, is:
- scientific method
- religion
- stories and rules of thumb
- intuition
So why are stories and intuition becoming more important in a business context? You have heard this a million times so I will only give you the expurgated version. The pace of change is accelerating. Things are going faster, partly because we are now extremely well connected with a myriad of communications devices: email, Skype, instant messaging, mobile phone, sms, ipod, web (and this is just what’s sitting in front of me this morning as I type this note). More decisions are required in shorter periods of time and while it would be ideal to adopt the scientific method for everything, it’s impractical.
Consequently we need to better understand how and why narrative and intuition works. What are the limitations? When mustn’t we rely on anecdotal evidence and where is it OK? To pretend that the majority of business decisions are not made based on our stories, our experience, without hard evidence, is simply putting our heads in the sand and hoping it will go away. The evidence-based management wave is a good thing as long as EBM practitioners realise that there will be always be decisions made without hard facts and that is not a failing. If an organisation overly promotes EBM without recognising the efficacy and role of stories and intuition, decision makers will make decisions the best way they can given the circumstances and then put extra effort in making them look evidence-based.
So what can you do to better understand the role of stories and intuition in your organisation? Start by listening for stories—get attuned to what stories in a business context sound like. When you’re at a meeting listen for people saying things like: “Something like this happened to me last year. We had a difficult start to the project …” or “Six weeks ago I was responding to a client request …” These are the beginnings of stories. Once you have tuned in to stories start asking for stories in addition to the facts. Here are some questions. Next, read up on business narrative. I’ve put together this resource on the topic of business narrative which includes a range of resource links and book suggestions. But nothing beats experience, so I recommend you find a problem that is difficult to tackle using just the facts like culture change, knowledge retention or leadership development and experiment with some narrative techniques.
Our US readers might like to know that Shawn and Mark will be presenting our Narrative Techniques for Business workshop in Seattle and Boston this March 07. For the full details check out the workshop description
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| 19/12/06 | | Narrative for Business Workshop in the USA |
Hi there. We’re planning to run our successful Narrative Techniques for Business in the USA in early 2007. We’re at the “choose the city and date” stage and are hoping you might let us know if you are interested in attending this one-day workshop. If so, what city in the USA are you based in? Just follow this link to send your feedback. We appreciate your help and look forward to meeting you in 2007.
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| 19/12/06 | | Questions to elicit stories |
The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation has produced an excellent little book called the Story Guide: Building Bridges Using Narrative Techniques. It’s filled with a range of techniques for collecting and using stories in an organisational setting. I’m a bit of a collector of questions so I was delighted to see their list of questions for finding stories.
“Tell me about a time when …” Tell me about a moment when …”
- you or your project faced a dilemma in a project
- you or your team experienced a significant turning point
- you dealt with a real crisis on a project. What happened before, during and after it?
- you felt really proud to be part of something
- you took a real risk and it paid off or didn’t pay off
- you were really inspired by what was going on around you
- you encountered an obstacle and overcome it
- you saw (one of your organisation’s values) really brought to life/being acted out
- your partnerships were working really well
- you saw positive changes happen as a result of your work
Colton, S., S. Ward, et al. (2006). Story Guide: Building Bridges Using Narrative Techniques, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.
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| 10/12/06 | | The PreMortem - anticipating a plan's weaknesses |
One of the techniques I’ve recently introduced to my lessons-learning projects is what Gary Klein calls a PreMortem. As we all know, a PostMortem helps us learn why a patient has died. A PreMortem explores why a project might die in the future. Here’s how Gary describes the approach. I find it works well at the end of an open space after the planning process is complete. It injects an additional level of realism into the plans.
Step 1: Preparation. Team members take out sheets of paper and get relaxed in their chairs. They should already be familiar with the plan, or else have the plan described to them so they can understand what is supposed to be happening.
Step 2: Imagine a fiasco. When I conduct the PreMortem, I say I am looking into a crystal ball and, oh no, I am seeing that the project has failed. It isn’t a simple failure either. It is a total, embarrassing, devastating failure. The people on the team are no longer talking to each other. Our company is not talking to the sponsors. Things have gone as wrong as they could. However, we could only afford an inexpensive model of the crystal ball so we cannot make out the reason for the failure. Then I ask, “What could have caused this?”
Step 3: Generate reasons for failure. The people on the team spend the next three minuted writing down all the reasons why they believe the failure occurred. Here is where intuitions of the team members come into play. Each person has a different set of experiences, a different set of scars, and a different mental model to bring to this task. You want to see what the collective knowledge in the room can produce.
Step 4: Consolidate the lists. When each member of the group is done writing, the facilitator goes around the room, asking each person to state one item from his or her list. Each item is recorded in a whiteboard. This process continues until every member of the group has revealed every item on their list. By the end of this step, you should have a comprehensive list of the group’s concerns with the plan as hand.
Step 5: Revisit the plan. The team can address the two or three items of greatest concern, and then schedule another meeting to discuss ideas for avoiding or minimising other problems.
Step 6: Periodically review the list. Some project leaders take out the list every the list every three to four months to keep the spectre of failure fresh, and re-sensitise the team to the problems that may be emerging. (pp 89–90)
Klein, G. (2003). Intuition at Work: Why Developing Your Gut Instincts Will Make You Better at What You Do
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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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| 14/11/06 | | Reminisicience work - ways to collect stories |
A couple a weeks ago we released our guide to anecdote circles and it has been extremely popular. We tried our best to give an expansive description of how you run these simple gatherings designed to elicit stories. Today on Working Stories Victoria made a substantial contribution by relating the techniques she is learning about how to trigger memories so people can reminisce. Once again we can learn so much from looking over the fence at other disciplines and I wasn’t even aware that there is a field called Reminiscence work. Here are the reasons, principles, and memory triggers for Reminiscence work.
UPDATE: The following material was developed by Bernie Arigho (www.age-exchange.org.uk) and reproduced with Bernie's permission.
Reminiscence: the recollection of one's own life experiences
Reminiscence work: The stimulation of social, education and creative activities that value people and their reminiscences
Ten good reasons for doing reminiscence work:
- It connects the past with the present
- It encourages sociability
- It helps to make care more person-centred
- it preserves cultural heritage
- It reverses the gift relationship (I.e. the reminiscences become an offer which makes the offerer more of an equal with someone who is caring for them)
- It enhances a sense of identity and self-worth
- It helps a process of positive life review
- It modifies people's perceptions of each other
- It helps with assessment of needs and functions
- It provides enjoyment on many levels
From Faith Gibson, Reminiscence and Recall: A Guide to Good Practice
Principles of good practice in reminiscence work:
- Person centred approach
- Good communication, active listening, recognise non-verbal signals (it is not a 'normal' conversation)
- Genuine interest
- Respect for personal choice (do not push the person into a selection, allow them to chose their story, this is important)
- Fidelity and confidentiality
- Establishing trust and rapport
- Support for painful emotions
- Non-judgemental attitude
- Uncompetitive
- Warmth
- Good facilitation skills
- Use of memory triggers that stimulate the 6 senses (see more below)
- Use of inclusive and relevant themes
- A range of imaginative and creative opportunities
- Monitoring and evaluation at every stage
- Support, advice and guidance for fieldworkers
The memory triggers,
Verbal
reminiscence themes (in this case the Royal Festival Hall), active verbs (e.g. doing), specific technical language related to one's work, proverbs, mottos, poems (apparently very good), 'naughty' words, personal idiosyncratic words, catch-phrases, ‘old’ words, hymns, songs, brand names, advertising slogans, nursery rhymes, skipping songs, names of special people and places
Non-verbal
Visual: photographs, newspaper cuttings, personal collectibles, film, slides, colours, birthday cards, scraps, old films, dreams, fashion magazines
Hearing: music, film scores, children, traffic, coughing,musical instruments, instruments tuning up, fireworks, transport, the sea, different kinds of work, birdsong, railway whistle, the weather, street calls
Tactile: animals, fabrics, carpets, coins, people, sand, water, artifacts
Smell; food, drink, tobacco, flowers, herbs, perfumes, cleaning and polishing materials, creosote, manure, the seaside
Taste: Food and drink, tobacco, the air, tastes of the past from old-fashioned sweets
Movement: dance, games, crafts, rocking, skating, cycling, holding a baby, different kinds of work, washing
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| 9/11/06 | | Focus, focus, focus - the big four |
Paradoxically, one of the dangers of specialising in the practical application of narrative techniques is their wide applicability; sometimes the people who might be interested in your services are unsure what business issues you can help with because you appear to do so many things. So last week we decided to focus on four business issues. We selected these four because our clients are asking for this type of assistance, we’re experienced in helping clients address these business issues and each issue is a natural fit for story-based approaches. They are:
- how to keep your people and knowledge
- facilitating meaningful and lasting change
- assessing the impact of difficult to measure initiatives
- getting knowledge flowing and enhancing collaboration
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| 2/11/06 | | Kurtz and Snowden on inter-organisational learning networks |
Cynthia Kurtz and Dave Snowden have written a thought provoking chapter on inter-organisational learning networks. I’ve seen their ideas develop over the last few years (on listservers, Skype chats, rare meet-ups and presentations) and this paper is an excellent synthesis and application of three key ideas (in my words):
- idealistic approaches predicated on predictability, analysis and the depiction of ideal future states are total nonsense for making progress in a highly connected, complex environments.
- dispassionate and objective observers can carefully analyse and diagnose ‘the problem’ then implement a solution—more nonsense. The fact is observers impact what they observe and every diagnosis is also an intervention.
- experts have the solution—even more nonsense. The knowledge required to change and successfully adapt exists within the group and participatory approaches seed and harness natural social processes.
The chapter goes on to say:
Two of the most important elements of the naturalistic sense-making approach are narrative (as one of the primary mechanisms of complex knowledge transfer, creation and interpretation in human society) and networks (as one of the primary realities of human life – we are still, unless artificially constrained, tribal and clan-like in our needs and perspectives).
The rest of the chapter looks at inter-organisation learning networks from the perspective of tangible benefits delivered by this type of organisational structure. K&S note that “Inter-organisational learning networks are valuable yet intangible: while participants feel that they and their organisation have benefited, they struggle to explain what exactly those benefits are and how they can be expressed.” According to K&S, the broader literature points to speed of innovation difussion and improved knowledge creation as tangible benefits of these types of networks, but Cynthia and Dave suggest three more:
- improved negotiation of multiple identities
- increased discourse regarding trust and rule structures
- greater productive conflict
I’m not going to give a blow by blow description of the paper. Instead I will highlight a few of the ideas that grabbed my attention—mind you, it sparked many thoughts.
Naturalistic approaches … seek to understand a sufficiency of the present in order to act to stimulate evolution of the system. Once such stimulation is made, monitoring of emergent patterns becomes a critical activity so that desired patterns can be supported and undesired patterns disrupted.
Most Significant Change is an obvious technique for monitoring because of its participatory nature and it’s story based. I know Dave has a slight reservation about MSC because he sees it as privileging some stories over others. I think Dave makes a fair point and MSC done badly will focus on the selection rather than the dialogue that’s created by the selection process. This is a danger to keep in mind for MSC practitioners.
Many employees do their work without being able to answer the question, "Who are you in this organisation?" (And possibly just as importantly, "Who are the others in this organisation?" and “Who is this organization?”).
When I was in London last week I met Martin Clarkson from the Storytellers and their business is entirely focussed on using a story approach to address “Who is this organisation?”
I was reminded at this point of the simple test I use to assess the likelihood a community of practice forming. If you can sensibly complete the sentence, “I’m a <blank>”, then there is a chance a community might form. For example, I was helping a Defence organisation start a community of practice for project managers. I asked them, “do people ever say, ‘I’m a project manager.’?” Absolutely! Great … people identify themselves as project managers so we could get a community going. The next community was more problematic. They wanted to create a community around the competency of ‘technical.’ Does anyone say, “I’m a technical.” No… I suggested they think of another possible community to establish.
One of the ways people have always talked about identity has been through the telling of identity stories which feature the individual or group as a coherent character with certain highlighted characteristics – the lone genius, the band of principled rebels, the misunderstood nobility. Stories told for purposes of identity negotiation (both individually and collectively) are fundamentally different from stories told for other purposes.
K&S point out three characteristics of an identity story:
- the story is well known
- they tend to have a dramatic or performance nature
- they are apparently useless; they appear to be about nothing
These stories help people understand what it means to be part of the group. I heard this story last week which I think is an identity story:
A new salesman joined the company and a week after joining was told by his manager that the team was meeting in Jervis Bay. On the day of the meeting the salesman got up at 4am and made the trip down the coast and on arriving at the bay phoned his manager on his mobile to find out the exact location of the meeting. The salesman was told the Jervis Bay is the name of the meeting room of their conference centre in the city.
The example of a sacred story of the nine day fortnight reminded me of the importance of trying to find these stories in organisations. One way might be to ask, in the middle of an anecdote circle, whether anyone is aware of stories that are told and retold. I did this a couple of days ago and the fellow I was talking could immediately recall two negative stories. I’m not sure these are the sacred stories described in the chapter but I’m sure they are important to how things get done.
I loved the analogy between a Tour de France team (a peloton) and an organisation dealing with complexity.
K&S suggest a set of three heuristics for ethical narrative work:
- always declare up front the use of narrative techniques (no stealth story work)
- if asked any question about what sort of narrative intervention you are doing (such as instructing executives in how to tell stories for cultural change), answer honestly
- appoint an independent arbitrator for any dispute over the use of narrative techniques in organisations
The last section of the chapter is about productive conflict. I have to admit that before reading this section and before chatting to Dave about the use of debate in a variety of forums I was sceptical about its effectiveness. As I saw it practised it seemed to be very much “I’m right, your wrong” approach that seemed to me less that productive. But I think if productive conflict is practised as described in this chapter I can see how a level a friction can be extremely beneficial. K&S’s main point, as I understood it, is that if a group focuses on conflict around ideas (cognitive conflict) and avoided conflict associated with interpersonal relationships (affective conflict) and conflict over who should do what (process conflict) a product outcome can emerge. This also assumes the group has a desire to improve the understanding or has a group problem to solve. Using a sporting metaphor, “play the ball, not the player.”
This chapter is well worth a read. The only criticism of have of it is the slight feeling of disjointedness throughout. Each section was interesting and useful but I couldn’t always see how it fitted into a larger picture.
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| 27/10/06 | | Celerity IT is looking for a Senior Business Analyst with Business Narrative skills |
This job for a senior business analyst in Dallas was advertised on Monster today.
Analyze business functions and document high quality functional requirements. The documentation of functional requirements includes business narrative requirements, use cases, and process flows.
The demand for practical narrative skills is increasing!
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| 24/10/06 | | What I believe about learning |
I was thinking this morning about what I believe about learning. Some of the things that sprang to mind include:
- people don’t think they’ve learned anything until they’ve reflected on what happened. When I conduct lessons learning sessions I get the same response. “So, what did you learn from the project” I’d ask. “Hmmm, let me think … no, nup, there was nothing new for me,” is a typical reply. We then start recounting the stories from the project and I then hear things like, “Hey, remember how we got our funding. What a mess. Remind me to just say no if it looks like that again.” The learning comes at this point of reflecting not in the act of work in many cases.
- learning is social—it benefits from conversations. While I believe learning can learn on your own, most learning comes through interacting with people. Learning richness increases as multiple perspectives are described, discussed, challenged and explored.
- learning is social, intellectual and emotional. There is a tremendous focus on intellectual learning in organisation yet we know decisions are made on more than the facts. Whether we are aware of it we learn through the emotions we experience. It’s no coincidence that we are better able to recall stories (our experiences) when they are attached to strong emotions.
- we learn through experience, and experience is shared through stories. I remember my honours year at uni spending 2 months researching the geomorphology of macro-tidal rivers, ‘learning about’ interference ripples, point bars and sedimentary structures. From the 3rd month I spent six weeks in the Ord River in Western Australia only to learn that it is never as clear as the diagrams in the text books make it out.
- we learn best when there is a reason to learn—I think this is an important aspect of sensemaking. We are awash with experience and information and we only notice things we care about. One of the reasons we care is when we know we must apply what we are noticing and making sense of.
- we get better at what we learn through practice. Focussed experience helps us develop a portfolio of patterns we can then use for future decision making. It’s said that it takes about 10 years the be proficient, perhaps expert, in a practice. But action without reflection through conversation doesn’t build proficiency.
- we all have different learning preferences and ways of interacting. On Saturday I facilitated a workshop attended by ninety futurists. They were exploring, as a group, how they might improve collaboration among their members. I invited everyone to arrange themselves along an imaginary line. At one end were those people who would prefer to avoid technology, even the phone was something they didn’t love using. At the other end were the techno-maniacs who love using blogs, wikis, and a raft of other web 2.0 gizmos. There was a completely even distribution along the line. And this is just one type of learning style preference. Audio, kinaesthetic, visual is another set of preferences to keep in mind.
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| 19/10/06 | | The Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles |
We are very pleased to announce the release of a little eBook we have been working on called The Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles. Our aim for this book is to bring together the combined practical experiences of Anecdote in running anecdotes circles and presenting the information in a fun, easy to use format. You can download a copy from:
http://www.anecdote.com.au/AnecdoteCircles
Feel free to pass it on to anyone you think might find it useful and we look forward to your comments and suggestions.
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| 10/10/06 | | Which storybased techniques are most used? |
Since completing our Australia wide survey on the attitudes and awareness of story and narrative approaches within organisations, I have been working my way through sharing the results. So far, the analysis has surfaced interesting results around:
- Australian managers intuit story most useful for culture change
- The 7 story forms valued within organisations
- The 5 ways storytelling has been discouraged in organisations
- What are you more aware of - positive or negative stories?
- Anecdote from a survey participant - on being a storylistener
This blog post shares the results from asking nearly 400 participants to identify, “as far as you are aware, which of the following story-based techniques does your organisation use”.
The big surprise for us was how popular Most Significant Change is!
(Which reminds me, have you heard of Zahmoo?)
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| 5/10/06 | | Australian managers intuit story most useful for culture change |
When asked in our recent Australian wide survey on the attitudes and awareness of story and narrative in organisations “How much have you heard or read about narrative and story methods for business?” the response from the 390 participating HR Managers, GMs, Directors and others was on the whole some or not much. (See figure below).
Even though the majority of our participants had read little around the approaches of story and narrative methods in business, when asked which areas they felt might have the greatest application and use for story approaches the area of organisational culture change was the clear leader.
The top 4 areas which emerged being considered useful for story were:
- 37.1 % Organisational culture change initiatives
- 32.6 % Enhancing leaders ability to motivate
- 32.2 % Enhancing leaders ability to communicate vision, goals and direction
- 31.4 % Organisational learning initiatives
It may come as no surprise to some that story has utility with working with culture. The work of Jung and Campbell, although controversial, was all grounded in story to explore cultures. It is also through story where we can learn the most about organisational culture. Think about those first few days in a new job, or in a new organisation. Think about the water cooler conversations you might have overheard. The tea-room stories shared. All of these stories provide a powerful way to learn about a companies culture. Yep, it makes sense to me that our participants might have intuited that story is useful for organisational culture change initiatives.
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| 28/09/06 | | Story as a source of insight |
Here is an anecdote from a senior executive from our recent survey which I just had to share. I’ve posted about the 5 ways in which stories are discouraged in organisations, as well as the 7 story forms which are valued in organisations. Paradoxically, but realistically, this anecdote contains elements of both of these, discouragement and value. This anecdote also reflects two of the key attributes which I think is vital to being a skilled storylistener. Patience and Hope. This senior executive appears to demonstrate both of these.
I have only been with this organisation for 2 months when I started I heard a lot of stories about the organisation. "The culture of this organisation is one that doesn't support it's staff!", "Management don't know what they want from us" and "You have a hard job ahead of you". These stories were greatly valued and encouraged by me but as a source of insight into organisational need and individual needs. These stories were, at the same time, not encouraged because there is a sense of constantly being negative, not seeing a way forward at all.
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| 27/09/06 | | The 5 ways storytelling has been discouraged in organisations |
Following on from our last research findings post suggesting the 7 story forms valued within organisations we have also explored the flip side question of “when has storytelling been discouraged or frowned upon in organisations?”. The broad themes which have emerged from our research are:
- When stories are gossip
- When there is a break down in trust and relationships
- Where there is no time
- When there are “bad news” stories
- When it sounds like corporate spin
Out of 162 responses, it is interesting to note that only 22 respondents specifically focussed on or shared their experiences with storytelling being discouraged or frowned upon in their organisation. The overwhelming majority of respondents shared their experience of how storytelling is valued within their organisation. Interestingly, when storytelling is considered to be gossip was one of the most common reasons for storytelling to be discouraged in organisations. As one participant said “it is usually discouraged as a form of gossip because it generally relates to company stuff ups”.
Below I have shared some of our participants responses around gossip, no time for stories, break down in relationships and “bad news” stories. Thanks again to all our survey participants.
Gossip and morality tales
I work in an organisation that is not very aware or conscious about its business. Storytelling and narrative techniques are not 'officially' sanctioned by management. However, there are a multitude of stories that circulate throughout the organisation, travelling via tea rooms, corridors, etc. The majority of these stories are like morality tales that warn of the punishment that is measured out by senior mgt for making mistakes, etc. I wonder what level of change could be made if the Executive team could harness the culture of storytelling and use it to create a more positive working environment.Gossip and rumourings – prefers hard facts and provable data
The organization as it stands now prefers hard facts and provable data. The little storytelling that happens happens outside of the office. Most of this is dis-empowering, rumor and lowers morale. This is of course increasing the discouragement of storytelling from executive management.There is no time
I work in Conflict Resolution, where the effectiveness of our work as practitioners depends on enabling people to hear each other's stories. However I work within a team whose leader does not have time for stories at least within her own team. It has been extremely frustrating to attend meetings where the use of anecdotes or stories would have enlivened and broadened our knowledge and understanding of the situation, yet the opportunity is denied because of time constraints whenever I raise the possibility. Ironically, this same leader is great at telling stories in a training situation and often uses anecdotes of her own experiences to illustrate training themes.Dealing with the board – There is no time for stories?
Story telling has always been discouraged as a method when dealing with the board and senior team, instead they insist on very formal and brief reports to tell the stories...and then wonder why they don't have a true grasp of the culture of the organisation.
A “bad news” story which spread
The story of how a large project went disasterously wrong, cost millions more than it was meant to and went months overdue was very wide spread and talked about. The aim of the story seemed primarily aimed at showing how that part of the business was not very capable - as everyone already knew - and that as a consequence the other bits of the business were more capable and felt good about themselves.A breakdown in relationships
Narrative has been discouraged when these elements are missing - when relationships and trust has broken down, when people are stressed, and emotionally frayed, and there is a tendency to cope by ignoring or downplaying the reality of other's experience. This is of course especially true when the stories being told are difficult to hear, or have some element of accusation at the listener.
When has storytelling been discouraged or frowned upon in your organisation? Have you ever heard of “good” gossip?
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| 26/09/06 | | The 7 story forms valued within organisations |
“When is storytelling valued within your organisation?” was one of the questions we explored within our Australian wide survey on awareness and attitudes of story and narrative techniques in organisations. Categorising the responses from almost 400 senior executives and decision makers from public and private organisations across Australia, there emerged 7 popular story forms. Those were:
- Hero stories – seen particularly for sales, customer service
- Success stories
- Inspirational stories
- “Lessons/Learning” stories
- “Who we are” stories – an embodiment of company values in action, not just espoused values
- “How we got here” stories – stories exploring a companies history and foundations
- “My time here” stories – provides insight into the individuals work/life history with the organisation
I’ve included an example of the hero story, success story, inspirational story and lesson/learning story forms below. Thanks to all our participants.
Hero Story for Sales
“Fairly often the heroism of the sales force is communicated to the greater organisation. One particular story that I remember and re-tell myself occasionally is of a sales exec who managed to get a contract signed on the last day of the month with a government department – the last day of the month was a Saturday!”Success Story
“Our organisation uses stories well in learning experiences and in our national conferences. About 3 years ago we completely abandoned the ritual sales/EBIT/Profit data driven powerpoints from our national conferences and we instead took our teams on a journey through great stories. This year at our national conference we had 800 store managers hearing about how we will get to our next performance horizon through the great stories that were already happening in the business. We then supplemented these internal messages with speakers who have told us their story. This year a particular highlight was an African American who beat all odds to become a star sportperson.”Inspirational Story
“We have people within out organization who volunteer for a 3 mth assignment to Cambodia to work with the UN World Food Program, as part of our committment to Corporate Social Responsibility. These volunteers are known within our organization as 'Storytellers'. They come back and travel around the country telling the story of their experience, motivating our staff to become engaged in the fundraising that we do and the inkind support that we provide from within Australia, as well as the rest of the world where we are located. In this situation, Storytelling is the only medium that would convey the emotion and engage the audience.”Lesson/Learning Story
“Safety Convention - a paralympian was invited to tell his story to the employees to get across the issue of safeworking and the duty of care to yourself and others. The Convention also provided an opportunity for employees to hear the stories of their work colleagues in small informal sessions and via themed stands and displays - example: those who were up for Safety innovation Awards were available at set times to share their story and expereinces that led to the innovation.”
When has storytelling been valued within your organisation? What other story forms have you noticed being valued?
Also read more about awareness of positive and negative stories in organisations here.
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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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| 19/09/06 | | Free Webinar: Change your Story Change your World |
Interested? Come get a taste at our free webinar that Evolve has invited us to present. Check here for more info.
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| 13/09/06 | | How can one improvise in a virtual world? |
How can one improvise (together) in a virtual world, using electronic connections? How can we bring the benefits of interactivity into this medium, which is often an isolating medium?
You know about Improv right? Improv is often known for principles like:
- Accept all offers
- Be present
- Do something
- Be average
- Make mistakes
- Let go
Izzy Gesell and I have been offered the opportunity to do a webinar for our upcoming joint workshop “Change your story Change your world”. As you may know, a webinar involves ringing in and joining in on, essentially, a very large conference call. This webinar can have anywhere between 100–250 callers. The challenge has been to design an interactive program with people we can’t see and we don’t even know how many people there are there. Waiting to join in. Or just sitting listening. The challenge is in the design of trying to create something in almost a brand new medium, providing interactivity and engagement, when so much of our work is about working with people in the same room. The same time and space.
The challenge then is how to create an interactive personal experience in a virtual medium like the webinar. How do we get people to feel connected and interactive when they can’t see each other or respond to each other in visual or usual real-time ways? Have you experienced this challenge?
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| 13/09/06 | | How can you become a skilled story listener? |
Business people love stories yet most of them just don’t know it yet. Luckily, many of the world’s leading business thinkers and business leaders point to stories as vital in understanding issues like organisational learning, cultural change, leadership, and evaluation. Using story approaches assumes one important aspect: stories. Storytelling is in our nature, but it seems that many of us have lost or forgotten the gentle art of listening; especially in organisations. How can you elicit stories? How can you help people share their stories? How can you become a skilled story listener?
Running Anecdote Circles is one great way to become a skilled story listener.
Soon we will be releasing our “Ultimate Guide to Anecdote Circles” ebook. In this eBook (which we will be giving away for free) we have drawn upon our collective experience of running hundreds of Anecdote Circles and have focussed on the art and science of anecdote circles. In particular we have aimed to distil our practical know-how which covers the seascape of skills, tricks, tips and exercises useful to running successful, fun and inspiring Anecdote Circles.
If you’d like to be one of the first to receive our free eBook be sure to subscribe to our newsletter. Otherwise, feel free to drop me a line.
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| 5/09/06 | | Pictorial stories that convey values |
A mining company just finished a traditional values exercise. You know the one, it ends up with a bulleted list of single words like integrity, diversity, professionalism. The designers quickly realised that their list wouldn’t mean much in the field so they started a project to collect stories from all their mine sites which illustrated the values. Each site agreed on the stories they thought reflected the values and then each story was illustrated and made into a poster. The genius of this intervention was in making posters specific to each mine site based on their stories AND not fully explaining the pictures on the posters. You had to be in the know to understand them. Victors to the site would ask, “so what’re the scribbles all about?” “Ah, yep that’s the story about …” and the story illustrating one of the values is passed on. Prompted storytelling at its best.
This reminded me of visit back in 1991 to Chartres Cathedral and a memorable tour conducted by Malcolm Miller. I remember Miller describing each stained glass window as a series of stories from the bible and pointing out how the priests used these magnificent windows to both intimidate the audience and prompt the priests as to which stories to tell. This might be blasphemy, but it sounds a bit like PowerPoint. 
[thanks to Jock Macneish for the mining story]
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| 2/09/06 | | Compromise for breakfast |
Seth Godin relates a story about breakfast on his blog. Except its not about breakfast but about how compromise insidiously erodes your intent and how one compromise can lead to another, and so on. I read Seth’s story and immediately thought of one of the the themes we have been pursuing about losing the humanity in our organisations. Its easy to see how economic rationalism and the pursuit of efficiency can lead organisations to make compromises that, over time, erode respect and humanity.
Seth’s blog demonstrates why good stories are so effective. They are simple, powerful and they convey richness. You don’t need to tell people what it means because they can relate to within their own framework of understanding.
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| 1/09/06 | | A whole new mind review |
Garr Reynolds over at Presentation Zen has written an excellent review of Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind. A couple of quotes that stand out:
“The future belongs to a different kind of person,” Pink says. “Designers, inventors, teachers, storytellers — creative and empathetic right-brain thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t.”
“Story” is not just about storytelling but about listening to stories and being a part of stories. We were all born storytellers (and “storylisteners”). As kids we looked forward to “show and tell” and we gathered with our friends at recess and at lunchtime and told stories about real things and real events that mattered, at least they mattered to us. But somewhere along the line, “Story” became synonymous with “fiction” or even “lie.” “Oh, he’s just telling you a big fat story,” they’d say. So “Story” and storytelling have been marginalized in business and academia as something serious people do not engage in.
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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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| 28/08/06 | | 10 reflections on storytelling |
It’s good to reflect. Take some time. Sit back... Reflect. Here’s some links to our thoughts on storytelling:
Story telling versus story writing
Ignite your story telling
Telling stories for a living
Using storytelling in sales
Story spines for sensemaking
Using story to communicate who we are
Storytelling is more about creating connections than knowledge transfer
Instructional video on storytelling
Storytelling survival guide
Storytelling versus storysensemaking
If you’d like to learn more about storytelling and really get your hands dirty we have 2 great workshops coming up in September and November!
Change your story Change your world and From story disaster to story master (or journeyman)
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| 26/08/06 | | Building trust - find and listen to other's stories |
Karen Armstrong has written a piece in the Guardian today encouraging us to consider and accept multiple perspectives regarding the complex strife in the Middle East. She builds her point of view by comparing the multiple and contradictory stories told in religions and the similarly conflicted narratives told by the protagonists in the current struggle. Her ideas equally apply to business on a smaller scale. We are all are trying to make sense of what’s happening and what might happen and to dogmatically adopt a single truth will ensure the clash continues. As Armstrong says:
Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures; we crave narratives that have a beginning and an end - something that we rarely encounter in everyday life. Stories give coherence to the confusion of our experience.
And the screenwriter Robert McKee remind us that with stories, “What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.” (p. 25)
Karen Armstrong concludes her piece with a plea that businesses should also heed.
We must, therefore, make a concerted attempt to listen critically to all the stories out there in order to gain a more panoptic vision. This includes our own cultural narrative. Our modernity has liberated many of us, but it has disenfranchised others. Counter-narratives that question the myth of western freedom must also be heard, because they represent a crucial element in the conflicted, tragic whole.
McKee, R. (1997). Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York, ReganBooks.
[via Robert Kall and Working Stories]