| 3/05/08 | | Conversations take time |
A few weeks ago, about the time of the 2020 Summit, I met with Dave Pollard at the Athenaeum Library on Collins Street. Dave was visiting from Canada. I've been a long-time reader of his blog and was excited by the prospect of finally meeting him face to face. As serendipity would have it Michael Sampson (Sharepoint collaboration guru) was also in town (from New Zealand) and joined us.
When you meet a person for the first time and you know there is plenty of things to talk about, the standard one hour meeting makes no sense yet I'm surprised how few people make time for longer conversations. Dave, Michael and I talked for 3-4 hours and it was only in the last couple of hours we got into the juicy topics. Yeh, yeh, I hear everyone saying, "We're soooo busy," but you know what, you need to make time for great conversations. The time excuse is our defence mechanism so we can say no to requests. How many times have you seen people greet each other with the words, "how're going? Real busy! Me too. Do you want to get a coffee? Sure?"
Well, I see something we talked about inspired a new post from Dave on his vision for how we might work in 2020. I'm glad to see it is filled with stories and concepts of collaboration.
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| 15/04/08 | | Conversations That Create—An International Thought Leadership Programme |
Here's an event you might like to attend. It's been organisation by Ralph Kerle from The Creative Leadership Forum.
Conversations That Create—An International Thought Leadership Programme
May 7 - 9, 2008
Venue: Centre for Leadership, Building 18, Chowder Bay Road, Mosman, Sydney NSW, Australia 2088
The Forum Challenge: "How can leaders in organisations lead generative conversations"
With International Thought Leaders
Shawn Callahan, Founder, Anecdote, Melbourne. Australia
Pavan Choudary, CEO, Vygon India, author and executive coach, Madras, India
Ralph Kerle, Chief Executive Officer, The Creative Leadership Forum, Sydney, Australia
Professor Kirpal Singh Ph.D, Singapore Management University, Dean of Economics, Arts, and Humanities, novelist, poet, Singapore.
and Session Leaders
Sandra Kay Lauffenburger (Laban), Dr Louise Mahler (Vocal and Choral)
A 2 1/2 day leadership programme designed to explore, develop and produce new thinking and learning around the way conversations occur to produce creative outcomes..
"Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so." Doris Lessing
The Forum Preamble
The hard assets of all organizations tend to constitute the primary value of the organization but they are useless if not for the human asset and specifically the resourcefulness of that human asset to organize and utilize the hard assets. And one of the essential elements of this human resourcefulness is that of imagination and creativity. But these two elements remain dormant without the generative contexts to draw them out and generative contexts are established and maintained only by the right kinds of conversations. If the output of a musician is music, the output of a playwright a script, the output of a sculptor a piece of visual art, then the output of a leader is creative conversation because it is the leader's job to organize and focus the energy of human resourcefulness. It is the job of the leader to create and maintain the conversational 'spaces' that trigger the imagination and apply that imagination to creative work. The majority of conversations that people have at work do not readily lend themselves to creative action. What is the case in your organization?
Conversations that Create will explore and develop how to create and maintain the necessary generative spaces and have the kinds of conversations needed to move individuals and teams into creative output. Participants will learn and practice practical ways of having conversations for possibility and opportunity, for engagement, commitment and creative action and for creating the necessary relationships for sustaining a generative space.
Click on www.thecreativeleadershipforum.com
Event Fees and Conditions
The cost to participate is $880 incl GST. All meals are included in the cost. Accommodation is excluded. Click here for full details of the venue situated on Sydney Harbour. The Forum is limited to 30 people. All presenters will be participants as well. This is not an academic conference, rather a peer to peer practice led information exchange with participants drawn from business, government, academia, the arts. Particular regard will be paid to the balance and mix of participants.
If you are interested please email Ralph Kerle on rk@thecreativeleadershipforum.com or call direct on 0412 559 603 in the first instance.
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| 25/03/08 | | Making sense of history |
I am reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I enjoyed his description of how history is extremely opaque; how "you see what comes out, not the script that produces events." He describes three ailments the human mind suffers when it comes into contact with history (he calls them the 'triplet of opacity'):
- The Illusion of Understanding. This relates to the pathology of thinking that the world we live in is more understandable, more explainable and therefore more predictable than it actually is. It also relates to our tendency to reflect and conclude that events had a specific cause and that events could have been averted by removing that specific cause.
- Retrospective Distortion. How we assess matters after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror. Taleb describes his impression that our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of anything, capable of mounting explanations for all sorts of phenomena and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability. History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture with few vibrations in between. Yet we believe in predictable, incremental progression. This is a slightly different take from Dave Snowden's description of 'retrospective coherence' where cause and effect in complex situations only becomes visible in hindsight.
- Overvaluation of Factual Information. Taleb also calls this 'the curse of learning', referring to the "handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories-when they "Platonify."" In many cases, particularly regarding complex issues, experts are no better at knowing what is going to happen than cab drivers. The difference is that the experts think they know better what is going to happen. Taleb also describes how gathering more and more facts, details and information doesn't help us predict what is going to happen.
Not surprisingly, we see these 'ailments' all the time. The trick is balancing our tendency to 'Platonify' with the need to make sense and become aware of the inherent unpredictability of our organisational environments. A bit more inquiry and listening, a little less arrogance (believing we know best). Continuing to see good data..and supplementing it with the willingness to try things and see what happens.
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| 14/01/08 | | Why sensemaking is vital |
I was listening to Melvyn Bragg's radio program, In Our Time , this morning on my iPod. The topic was Albert Camus. In discussing his novel, The Stranger, one of the distinguished panellists felt that Camus was suggesting that meaning is not pre-inscribed in the world around us and we are continuously seeking meaning in an inherently meaningless world. I almost toppled off the step machine. Do we live in an inherently meaningless world? On first thought I think the answer is yes. The onus is on us to make sense of our world.
By the way, Melvyn's podcast is a joy. I particularly like its eclectic nature. Today it's Camus, last week The Four Humours, and before that we had The Sassanian Empire, Discovery of Oxygen, Mutation and The Fibonacci Series.
| 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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| 17/08/07 | | Wiki Patterns |
We're currently working on a knowledge project with a client, part of which involves setting up a collaborative environment for managing and editing content - in this instance a wiki.
As part of the initial setup, I've been looking at 'best practices' for wiki implementation and adoption and I quickly came across wiki patterns , which is such a fantastic resource.
But that in itself is not all that I find interesting about the site. For me, it was the observation of the structure and language of 'patterns' used on the site and my association of that with the process of sense-making that I find intriguing.
Now, being the new guy here at Anecdote, I'm still immersing myself in the use of narrative and complexity theory, but my current understanding using the Cynefin framework -- is that 'best practices' belong in the known domain ... when things are prescriptive, can be reduced to binary decisions; black and white, yes and no answers. There is a known solution.
On the other hand navigating complexity requires us to detect new and emerging patterns. Humans are good at seeing patterns, making sense from them and then acting on them. Deciding on courses of action or 'solutions' in this domain are about influencing these patterns and behaviours, reinforcing the positives and discouraging the negatives.
The wikipatterns site is doing exactly this - putting wiki adoption squarely into the complex camp, and using patterns to help people make sense of what to do and not what to do, rather than trying to lay out prescriptive answers on how-to implement wikis, because it's just not that simple when humans are involved!!
| 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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| 30/07/07 | | Ideas made to stick - a scene from West Wing |
Made to Stick is one of my favourite books at the moment because it's well written and well researched. And, you know what? the ideas stick. So I thought I would pass on this sticky story from Victoria Ward's blog. It's a scene from West Wing.
In one of the episodes of the final series of the West Wing, CJ Cragg is more and more frustrated by her inability to make a dent, leave something behind. So when someone from an NGO tries to make an appointment with her, she breaks with habit and gives him a slot in her diary.
He overwhelms her with statistics about the atrocities in Sudan. Thousands, millions, terrible things, rape, amputation, devastation. It’s all beyond her grasp, there is nothing she can imagining doing in this vastness of human failure, and he can see from her face that he is losing her attention, so he says, suddenly
‘When the babies die, the mothers carry them round in their arms because there is nowhere to put them down.’
20 words (I approximate, from memory.)
‘When the babies die, the mothers carry them round in their arms because there is nowhere to put them down.’
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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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| 20/07/07 | | Taking on new tasks |
A few posts ago I described how you can delegate tasks in a way that informs people with what they need to know to do a job in a complex world. Now let's look at what you might do when taking on a new task, project, or assignment that has been delegated to you. What follows is based on an excellent podcast by David Maister called Managing Your Boss.
In order to do a good job and build a solid reputation you need to be good at receiving assignments. This means really understanding what your manager/client really wants and needs.
There are a set of questions you should ask whenever your are asked to take on a task. In an ideal world the person asking for your help will give you all the information you need to do a good job. Unfortunately this rarely happens so it’s up to create a way of doing things where it is OK to ask questions.
When your manager asks you to take on a new project or tasks simple ask, “I really want to do a great job for you but may I clarify a few things?”
Then use this checklist1 to collect the information you need to do a good job. I'm sure you will be able to think of additional questions to ask and I would love to hear your suggestions in the comments.
Get the context
First, ask for the context for the assignment. “Can you please tell me what you are going to do with this when I get it done? Tell me who it is for and where does it fit with other things so I know how you are going to use it so I can give it to you in the fashion which is best suited to your need.”
This may sounds like you are being picky, but it also sounds like you are truly interested and it is usually well received.
What is the deadline?
“When would you like it and when is it really due?”
Push a little to find out the absolute last minute that is must be done by while still promising to do it as soon as you can.
Get the scope clarified
“This time would you like me to do the thorough job and take a little longer or this time would you like me to do the quick and dirty version. I can do either. I just need to understand what you would like.
Format
What’s the format you want to see of the results?
”How would you like to see the output of my work presented? What would make your life easier? I want to smooth your way so please give me some guidance on the format which you prefer the best.“
What is the time budget?
”Roughly how long do you expect me to spend on this so I know whether I’m spending too much time on this task and not waste your time.“
Relative priority
”What is the relative importance of this task compared to the other things you have asked me to do? I will try and do them all but if push comes to shove do you want me to put this at the top of the list or put this one at the bottom of the list?“
Playing back your understanding
After asking your questions and making lots of notes, ask whether you can check for understanding. ”May I please just read back to you what you have asked me to do so I can confirm that I have got it down right?“ This is an important step and you’ll be amazed at how many misunderstanding will be avoided by undertaking this process.
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| 11/07/07 | | How I used a story spine |
Viv McWaters has just posted an example of a story spine which reminded me of how we are using story spines in our sensemaking workshops. I was inspired to used this technique after observing how my dad made sense of something (a trivial example) after he had the opportunity to tell a story. Here's what happened as I told it back in January this year.
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.”
When Dad told this story I was immediately struck with how he quickly moved from his story to a heuristic without analysis or considering the options. But of course, this is just how we often make decisions, so I thought I could replicate this process in our workshops.
My first opportunity was at a workshop in Tasmania where we were helping natural resource managers develop a knowledge strategy for their region. We had reached the point in the workshop where we had identified a set of issues that were either working well or needed some attention so I asked the groups to grab an issue and tell a story explaining what happened. People busily jumped into the activity but I noticed they were just writing dot points detailing their opinions about what had happened. No one wrote a story.
It seems that they didn't know what to do to write a story. I had just assumed that everyone else thinks about stories like I do and has a sense what one looks like. Big mistake!
My next opportunity was at another knowledge strategy workshop but this time with a government department in Canberra. I had remembered Andrew introducing us to story spines so I dug out the blog post. Here is the simple story spine (Viv's example is more elaborate).
Once upon a time...
Everyday...
But one day...
Because of that... (repeat three times or as often as necessary) Until finally...
Ever since then...
And the moral of the story is...(optional)
Rather than use “Once upon a time” I instructed people to start their stories with “Way back when”. I find the fairy tale beginning too foreign for business people.
Well, the groups took to the tasks with gusto and in a very short time (30 min) we had eight stories that described various aspects of what was happening. Each group recited their story to great applause.
This is an effective way to get people primed for intervention design and we found that the groups were more aware of the subtleties and multiple viewpoints by going through a set of sensemaking tasks, this being just one.
Technorati Tags: knowledge strategy
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| 9/07/07 | | Cognitive biases |
Who said we were rational beings?
Here is a multitude of cognitive biases we are all subject to such as the information bias (the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action), false consensus effect (the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them), and the halo effect (the tendency for a person's positive or negative traits to “spill over” from one area of their personality to another in others' perceptions of them).
I stumbled upon this web page using stumbleupon.
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| 28/06/07 | | Data, Information, Knowledge: a sensemaking perspective |
The relationship among data, information and knowledge is often depicted as a pyramid. With data at the base, it’s converted to information and information converted to knowledge. This metaphor of a pyramid or ladder to explain these concepts is unhelpful because you start to believe one is better than the other and there is a tendency to extrapolate to the next level believing that knowledge is simply extrapolated to form wisdom—I have even heard people talk about wisdom management. My two days at the meaning making symposium has helped me see this relationship differently, that is, viewing data, information and knowledge as a system.
Thanks to John Barton at the symposium reminding me of a view of data, information and knowledge first brought to my attention by Dave Snowden which I will extend to include the role of sensemaking and context.
Knowledge acts as an interpretant to turn data into information. The information we notice (we don’t notice all information channelled toward us), might create some level of dissonance (its surprises us or we ask ourselves, “What’s the story here?”) and if we care about resolving this dissonance we create knowledge. Knowledge is created through a sensemaking process.
But data to one person is someone else’s information. A commodities trader might stare at a computer screen of numbers which would look to most people as raw data. To the commodity trader, however, slight changes in the numbers conveys messages which act as information they might convert to knowledge (via sensemaking) and take action. Consequently, context is a key ingredient acting as an underlay to all three concepts of data, information and knowledge.
Originally posted: 30/03/06
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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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| 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.
Technorati Tags: staff induction
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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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| 18/05/07 | | More on sensemaking |
We recently blogged about the benefits of making sense of stories. Last week we needed to explain to a client why participation in the sensemaking process was important, both from a collective and an individual perspective. Some of our thoughts are shared below.
Sensemaking is a process designed to enable groups of people to see patterns that were once hidden to them and develop a common understanding of what is required to address an issue. While the sensemaking (and subsequent intervention design) process will result in the production of artefacts (reports, lists of action items, descriptions of the current situation etc) much of the value is derived through participation in the process. It is not a process where you say 'make sense of this and tell me the answer'. Much of the benefit comes from determining 'what it means' for yourself. Sensemaking is beneficial at an individual level as our values and assumptions are tested and either confirmed or found wanting. Either way, participants are more effective in the workplace through the insights provided by participating in the sensemaking workshop.
One of the critical inputs to the sensemaking process is the experience, knowledge and perspectives of the various stakeholders. It provides an opportunity for an unhindered look at the experiences of participants and the gaining of new and valuable insights into the state of the system under examination; what is working and what isn’t, and the implications moving forward.
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| 16/05/07 | | A sensemaking story |
Here's an interesting story Bob Sutton recently received from a US Marine in relation to his excellent book, The No Asshole Rule. It's a terrific sensemaking story because I can imagine people will have strong opinions about what the Marine did and so the story will easily start a conversation that will help the participants better understand how they might act if they ever encountered such an asshole.
I'm reminded of a story of my own which I'd like to share with you. I was part of a special project for the Marine Corps. I was in a leadership role actively playing a part in the physical military operations and the academic/management part ruled by civilian contractors. Because of my education, I was tasked to play a liaison role which often meant bearing ill will from both parties as I tried to explain their intentions to the others. Right off the bat, a member of the civilian management team rubbed me the wrong way. I wasn't sure what it was until he severely berated one of my senior Marines, telling him at one point that “we had all taken a oath to defend this Nation.” I was offended by that. I knew for a fact he took no such oath. But more importantly, I believed that he was acting in a manner in which he thought was consistent with military leadership-- an assumption he developed from watching too many movies.
I held my tongue at the moment but that evening during our After Action Review, I brought the issue up. We were seated across from each other at a conference table. As soon as I aired my complaints, he puffed up in his chair, put both hands on the table and started looking at me menacingly. He was a large man-- about six and a half feet and easily 250 pounds. At that moment, I realized that he was trying to physically intimidate me. I'm much smaller-- about 5'10“ and 190 pounds. I could tell that this was a natural reaction to him and he did this often. For a moment I was amused. When he continued to glare at me, I finally drew my sidearm, placed it on the table and said to him, ”Calm down. I deal in real violence.“ He settled down and walked out of the office a couple of minutes later. I hoped that this encounter would shift his behavior but it didn't. He was a senior member of the team and he started treating everybody else worse. Me-- he mostly left alone. I think I made my life better but I sure didn't do anything to make my teammates lives easier. Eventually, the most senior member of the civilian team removed him but not before I threatened to ”accidentally“ hurt him in training. I'm not proud I had to resort to that.
This was my first contact with the civilian management world and I was not impressed. Unfortunately, my experiences after haven't been much better. We certainly have our share of lousy leaders in the military world but I was surprised to see how much backstabbing and political in-fighting existed in civilian leadership circle.
Technorati Tags: bob sutton, us marine
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| 14/05/07 | | The story of a map - Massimo Vignelli's 1972 NYC Subway Map |
Imagine if you could get people to talk on camera about their achievements and mistakes. The result could be a powerful, especially if you use these stories to get people talking. Here's a tiny example on a topic dear to my heart: how to convey complex information simply. In this clip Massimo Vignelli talks about his 1972 information design masterpiece, the New York City Subway map. There are a couple of things I noticed in this four minute video, which is an out-take for the documentary Helvetica.
- the actual map was a powerful reminder device
- enough time had elapsed for Massimo to be comfortable to talk about his mistakes (just one) - mind you, you could imagine his self confidence soaring
- the beauty of the map comes from knowing what to leave out--and if Massimo could do it again he would have left out even more
Mr Vignelli was inspired by Henry Beck's 1933 legendary map of the London Underground. You can take a look at London's current versions here. Michael Bierut has written an essay called Mr Vignelli's Map which you might enjoy.
Thanks to 37 Signals for the pointer
Technorati Tags: information design, massimo vignellie
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| 5/05/07 | | Leaders blogging |
I'm starting to see more leaders blogging. While working for a construction company at the moment I discovered that one of their general managers is posting a video to the division's blog every month. This is not a highly produced effort. More like a 6 minute talking head with a hand held handy cam. By all accounts people love it.
Rob Vertessy was, until recently, the Chief Scientist at CSIRO's Land and Water Division and is now the Chief Scientist - Hydrology at the Bureau of Meteorology. While at CSIRO he published a blog which you can take a look at here until someone decides to take it down. Rob had a clear policy for how he used the blog. Anything that was blogged represented an informal view and he wouldn't be held to account for anything that he wrote on the blog. Rob delivered official statements via email. The blog enabled Rob to talk about what he was doing and thinking. I hope he continues the practice at the Bureau of Met. As an aside, Rob was finishing his PhD when I was completing my honours. We both were working on geomorphological topics, Rob on tidal rivers in Northern Territory while I was working on the macro-tidal Ord River in Western Australia. Rob helped me make sense of all the mud I collected.
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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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| 13/04/07 | | The need for walls? |
Dave Snowden is puzzled with one of my posts that mentions Frost’s poem, Mending Wall, when I say:
“when you read the entire poem (in context) you realise Frost is questioning the need for fences"
Dave responds categorically saying: “I cannot see any reading (my emphasis) that would support such a statement. The poem is about the dynamics and social process of mending, not the static nature of the wall.”
I understand the metaphor Dave. Give me a break. I’m surprised that someone with such a deep understanding of sensemaking and the need for multiple interpretations can only see one interpretation of a poem. Have a read of this part of the poem and hopefully you can see that the narrator is questioning the need for walls. Of course it is ironic that we are arguing over this particular poem.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
I suspect you hadn’t seen this part of the poem because you were using other parts to make a point about barriers in complex systems. I think it’s a classic example of seeing what you are looking for.
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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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| 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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| 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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| 20/03/07 | | Sensemaking |
This description of sensemaking makes the most sense to me.
Sensemaking involves turning circumstances into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves as a springboard into action. (Weick et. al 2005)
I’ll tell you why.
When I run lessons learning sessions I’ll often start the session by asking, “So, what did you learn from this project?” The typical response is, “Hmmmm, let me think … Nup, didn’t learn anything really.” Then we timeline the project, identify key events, retell stories of what happened and then this happens: “Remember how we got the funding? It was a shocker. We had to get the Commissioner to move money to the large projects vote and as a result we never really had a project sponsor. I would never do it that way again.” It’s this point of putting the idea into words, usually as a story, that the lessons are identified (not sure they’ve been learned yet).
The same think happened to me last week. We (I’m working with Patti Anklam and Bruce Hoppe on this one) are running a social network analysis for a global community of practice of chocolate experts. When we presented the first SNA charts the immediate response from the client was, “Nothing new here really.” After a number of discussions the response was, “Wow! Heaps of insights.”
Weick, K. E., K. M. Sutcliffe, et al. (2005). “Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking.” Organization Science 16(4): 409-421.
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| 12/03/07 | | Intuition and decision making |
Margie Borschke interviewed me a while back and wrote this article on decision making.
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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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| 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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| 31/01/07 | | Peer assist animation |
When you’re steeped in a discipline like knowledge management you start to assume that everyone knows about techniques like After Action Reviews and Peer Assists. Of course this is untrue. Steve Dale over at Dissident has discovered this neat Flash animation that describes the peer assist process. I particular like the idea of rotating peer assists.
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| 15/01/07 | | Wow, is this really what a knowledge map looks like? |
Here’s a good idea. A neat compilation of a range of visualisation techniques arranged in the form of a periodic table. I was checking out all the different examples by rolling my mouse over each ‘element’ and then notice this one titled ‘knowledge map’.
Hmmm, of all the knowledge maps I’ve helped organisations create, they’ve never looked like this! Mind you, with my love of geography and old cartographic masterpieces, this is a gem. I suspect, however, that Edward Tufte would label it as chart junk—it looks good but it doesn’t tell you anything.
I have talked before about how there’s rarely a single ‘knowledge map’ that adequately describes an organisations knowledge assets (this post