| 26/05/10 | | Listening, mentoring, storytelling |
I'm sitting in a cafe thinking about what makes a great listener. I can see a few. They're leaning forward, nodding, smiling, asking questions. You can tell they want to be there and that they care about the person they are listening to. They're not glancing at their watch, their phones and there're no computer screens to distract them. They take turns telling their stories and sharing their thoughts but when they're listening they're engrossed in what the other person is saying and they're not interrupting. It's impossible for me to say for sure but I'm imagining that when they're listening they're not working out the next thing they're going to say to impress their friend, to knock down their argument, to win the point. It's a natural flow, improvisation style.
Most of know how to listen but why does it seem to evaporate in the workplace?
I suspect we've created workplace cultures that emphasise problem solving and getting the job done quickly and getting through the work. When someone asks a question people are clamouring to answer it and show that they are the fixer, the can-do person. Or they enter into interrogation mode to get the information so they can fix the problem.
And there are distractions galore. Phone beeping, computers beeping, colleagues bleating, all competing for our attention.
Yet there are many important times when deep listening is essential. One particular type of conversation which is top of mind for me at the moment is mentoring.
When someone you're mentoring pops into your office and says, "I'd really appreciate your thoughts on this thing I'm grappling with," then it's time to go into deep listening mode. Can you be like the people in the cafe?
A couple of ideas.
First, remove distractions. Put your mobile out of site, put your phone on silent and if your computer screen is on a swivel arm move it so it's also out of sight. Better still come around the to the other side of your desk and sit next to them with your distractions out of eye shot. I have one client who has to put his back to the glass wall of his office so he can't see the stream of people who wander past and want to speak with him.
Second, ask good questions. You want them to open up and explore the issue. Hopefully they will get a new perspective and some possible options. So you need to listen carefully to ask good questions. As a general rule, 'why' questions will get to the bigger purpose. 'How' and 'what' questions will get the detail of how things work and what might be done. And my favourites, 'when' and 'where' questions often get you stories.
Third, tell stories. You would think that listening is about just shutting up but it would be pretty weird to sit quietly and not say a peep. So to avoid just solving their problem, a strong urge for Type A's, recount some of your experiences to get them thinking of what's possible without telling them what to do.
Fourth, show that you are listening. How you look, how you respond, what you say, all indicate whether you really care and are listening. I'm not a big fan of summarising everything someone says in the form "so what I'm hearing you say is ..." I reckon that's distracting and merely a rote response. A better way is to try and predict a consequence of what they are saying and test it. "Wow, that must have been hard to take?" This way you are adding to the conversation. Body language is the other way to show you're listening. You know what to do. I find it fascinating to watch body language in our workshops. When we are sharing opinions people lean back and have that "prove it to me" look on their faces, but when are sharing stories everyone leans forward.
I'd love to know more about how to help people be better listeners. Any thoughts would be welcomed. One great source on the web is my friend Jill Chivers who has a business called I'm Listening. She has a video-based program you can take and learn to be a better listener. Note to self: must go on it.
Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
| 2/02/10 | | Keeping richness in our decision making |
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807–73) was a Swiss-born American zoologist and geologist who taught at Harvard. Imagine that you went to Louis Agassiz’s laboratory at Harvard as a student. Agassiz would place a small tin pan in front of you with a small fish and utter the stern requirement that you “should study it, but should on no account talk to any one concerning it, nor read anything related to fishes” (Cooper, 1987: 79) nor use any artificial aids like a magnifying glass until he gave you permission to do so. As one student said, “To my inquiry ‘What shall I do?’ he said in effect “Find out what you can without damaging the specimen; when I think you have done the work, I will question you” (Cooper, 1987: 82). Students kept telling Agassiz what they had found and Agassiz kept saying “That is not right.” This went on, typically, for 100 or more hours with the same now “loathsome” fish. Agassiz would keep asking “What is it like?,” “Do you see it yet?” and saying “You have not looked carefully” and “You have 2 eyes, 2 hands, and 1 fish” (Cooper, 1987: 81). Gradually, things would begin to change. One student replied to the professor’s query as to whether he had seen one of the most conspicuous features of the fish, the symmetrical sides with paired organs, “No I have not seen it yet, but I see how little I saw before.” Agassiz replied, “That is next best . . . now put away your fish, go home; perhaps you will be ready with a better answer in the morning. I will examine you before you look at the fish” (Cooper, 1987: 81; emphasis added). Another student reported the following experience: “I pushed my finger down its throat to feel how sharp the teeth were. I began to count the scales in the different rows, until I was convinced that that was nonsense. At last a happy thought struck me—I would draw the fish; and now with surprise I began to discover new features in the creature. Just then the Professor returned. ‘That is right,’ said he; ‘a pencil is one of the best eyes’” (Cooper, 1987: 81; emphasis added).
Agassiz (nicely told by Karl Weick on an article on richness) was acutely aware of the human propensity to name something, to categorise it, and then discover its properties vanish before our eyes. Once named we no longer need to attend to the details to work it out. As Weick points out, naming things is an essential action to coordinate activities. Unfortunately we lose detail in the process.
One way to keep richness in our understanding is to identify the stories that represent situations. We are currently working for a government agency helping them to create and tell their strategic story. They've identified seven strategic directions and in and of themselves are abstract ideas such as, achieve with our partners, be easy to deal with, nurture independence. These ideas only make sense when illustrated by an prototypical story.
References
Cooper, L. 1987, 'Louis Agassiz as a teacher', in CR Christensen (ed.), Teaching and the case method, Harvard Business School, Boston, pp. 79–82.
Weick, K.E. 2007, 'The Generative Properties of Richness', Academy of Management Journal, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 14–9.
HT to Tim Kannegieter for pointing me to the Weick paper.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
| 10/11/08 | | Ask a gardner what she knows, in a garden |
Remembering experiences is heavily dependent on surroundings. I’m currently helping an energy company learn the lessons from retiring employees. I’m videoing their experiences with the view to facilitating sessions using the footage; it’s not really about capturing knowledge, just sparking new conversation based on what’s captured. My last subject was the company’s network controller. He’d been in the role for 10 years and I interviewed him in his office, which was right next to the control room. The control room looks like a mini version of the one from the movie The China Syndrome. His office has a window looking into the control room and it is festooned with charts and whiteboard diagrams. Everywhere you look are computer screens. He has a large table in the middle of his office, which has been the site of many disaster response war rooms. He was brimming with stories.
The network controller was retiring two weeks after my interview and I asked whether I could interview him again at his home. He was happy to help. A month later we met in his lounge room and the response was noticeably different. The stories weren’t as rich. It was harder for him to recall the events. The surroundings didn’t contain the memories and prompters to help him remember what he knew. Surroundings make a big difference to what people can recall.
This pattern repeated itself yesterday, but in a positive way. I had lunch with Patrick Lambe in Singapore and after dim sum (and a durian fruit dessert) we jumped in a cab and visited one of Singapore's best book stores, Kinokuniya. We wandered around the store chatting and the book covers that grabbed our attention sparked new threads in our conversation. Really enjoyable albeit an expensive outing. Here are the books I bought:
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science
Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
Einstein's Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius
Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
| 7/10/08 | | Please elaborate |
Examples, especially in the form of stories, help us make sense of what someone is saying. This is partly because when we listen to an example we are using our natural pattern matching abilities (something our brain has evolved to excel in) to link the example with our own experience. We then adjust our understanding based on the new input.
So it makes sense that examples also increase our ability to remember the main idea they illustrate.
Researchers at the University of Nebraska put this idea to the test. They asked 22 students to read an essay about a fictitious African country. The essay consisted of 32 paragraphs, each paragraph with a single, main idea sentence followed by none to three one-sentence examples. Here is an example paragraph from the essay.
Virtually all social reforms of the early 20th Century were the personal responsibility of King Manual. A state run medical service was established by King Manual in 1900. A system of primary education was created under Manual's direction in 1920. The forceable recruitment of native workers was stopped by Manual in 1915.
When they were done the researchers asked the students to recall the main ideas.
The result: the more examples (at least up to three), the better the recall of the main idea. The researchers suggest that the laws of diminishing returns must set in at some point. The likelihood of nine examples being more effective than eight is slight.
So why don't we see many examples in the things we read, especially in business writing?
I suspect it takes more time to find an example and it's much easier to espouse an opinion.
For example, I'm writing a client report at the moment and I've asked my client to send me a couple of examples illustratinh how their information system has been used to have a bottom-line and positive impact on the business. I also asked for examples of when the system had been misused or failed the organisation. My client could immediately think of examples of the latter and is still looking for our positive examples.
So maybe it's harder to find the positive stories and business report writers have a tendency to want to show strength and a positive outlook, and this is more easily done, especially with time pressures, with opinions. The problem is, we are creating a false intellectual economy because without the examples your readers don't know what you really mean and instantly forget the main ideas.
Palmere, M., S. L. Benton, et al. (1983). "Elaboration and Recall of Main Ideas in Prose." Journal of Educational Psychology 75(6): 898-907.
I discovered this research reading John Medina's Brain Rules.Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 10/09/08 | | Context is king |
In case there are still people out there who believe we act as rational decision makers, take this scenario.
You're in a shop to buy a new ipod and you hear from a friend that two blocks down the street you can get the same one $50 cheaper.
Do you go?
Yes. Of course. It's $50 buck straight back in your pocket.
You are in a shop buying a multi-thousand dollar flat-screen TV. You hear from a friend that you can get the same TV two blocks down the street for $50 cheaper.
Do you go?
Of course not. It's not worth the effort.
BUT IT IS THE SAME $50 IN YOUR POCKET IF YOU DO!
Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 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
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
| 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.
Technorati Tags: rick davies
Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
| 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.’
Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 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
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 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
Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 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
Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
| 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 strikes. Just as 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 jeweller and asked him to create a die from which he would cast sets of golden cuff links. One cuff 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
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 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
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
| 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
Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
| 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.
Technorati Tags: rob vertessy
Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
| 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. Every time 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 participants 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 interpretations 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 everywhere 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 suspect they are rarely referred to.
Are managers in your organisation recounting stories and asking people for their interpretation?
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
| 12/03/07 | | Intuition and decision making |
Margie Borschke interviewed me a while back and wrote this article on decision making.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 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 also describes the mapping process we use and its origins). The process of identifying and talking about your knowledge assets is more important than the artifact. But if I was to suggest an alternative to the example presented in the Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods I would offer this one.
So to explain my example. The knowledge objects are artifacts, skills, heuristics, experience or natural talents people have in the organisation. The business processes are key processing in the organisation like engagement delivery, client satisfaction, opportunity identification. It’s not unusual to have 30+ processes listed. Ranking is the ranking of the processes from most important to least important (a difficult but important activity for a decision making group). Risk is the likelihood of the knowledge object being lost. This knowledge map is developed by a group of people in a workshop. The aim is to identify important knowledge objects that are vulnerable so initiatives can be designed.
What knowledge mapping techniques do you use?
This approach to knowledge mapping was first developed by Dave Snowden while he worked at IBM. Check out m related post above for all the references.
[via Guy Kawasaki]
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
| 23/11/06 | | When collaborations go bad |
Here’s a great video describing how a collaboration between Rob Fulup and Michael Schrage (author of Serious Play
In one of my first blog posts (Back again bemoaning the limitations of text), three blog-sites ago, I made the observation that communication tools and artifacts (perhaps related to boundary objects) are important devices for co-creating meaning. Back then I was particularly interested in the role of diagrams.
The ability for collaborators to sketch diagrams as a way to create and communicate ideas has considerable advantages over collaborating using a discussion forum approach that relies predominantly on text . The key difference lies in the fact that a diagram is co-created and its meaning is developed through the interchange between the collaborators. The meaning of words, however, are generally predefined and significant effort is required to convey accurately what you mean.
In the case of Rob and Michael they used a software tool that enabled them to capture and prioritise their ideas and project them on a wall. Nothing new there. Mindmanger could be used, for example. I think the real transformation was facilitated by Bernie as he asked questions, rephrased statements and gently guided the conversation.
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
| 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.
Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
| 7/10/06 | | The people are the organisation |
It is the most ubiquitous platitude of corporate life: “People are our most important asset.” The undeniable reality, of course, is that the human side of enterprise remains the ultimate backwater. Be honest: How many companies do you know that are as creative, as disciplined, as businesslike about the people factor in business as they are about finance, engineering, marketing?
I came across this statement (and question) in the Maverick’s Manifesto circulated in the latest ChangeThis newsletter (which never fails to provide valuable insights). One of Anecdote’s motivations is to bring humanity back into our organisations and thus our methods are designed to help create the conditions to achieve this. There are many people we speak to about what we do who’s eyes glaze over when we mention topics like sensemaking, business narrative, storytelling, open space, communities of practice etc. There are also many, the early adopters, who’s eyes light up. They realise that they need to be able to answer the question ‘why would great people want to join the organisation’ and they understand that you don’t get happy customers from having unhappy, unfulfilled staff.
While I am often surprised at the number of managers I meet who just don’t get that ‘the people are the organisation’, we are fortunate that our work brings us into contact with organisations that are serious about the people factor. This reinforces our optimism that having fulfilling and humane organisations will eventually ‘go mainstream’.
Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack
| 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!
Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
| 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?
Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack
| 18/09/06 | | If you can't measure it.... |
I recently heard a presentation that mentioned the truism ‘if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it’. It reminded me of how uncomfortable I have always been with this statement and the way it gets touted like a mantra in some organisations. If we view the functions of management as ‘plan, organise, lead, control, direct’, then both ‘measuring and managing’ appear to be more appropriate in an ordered world where cause and effect are knowable. For complex situations, where cause and effect cannot be predicted with acccuracy, the concepts of measure and manage aren’t sufficient to be successful. Measure and manage also don’t make any allowance for emergence and tend to overlook any unintended consequences. Fortunately I think many more people recite this truism than really believe it.
I prefer to view the function of management as ‘creating the conditions that enable people to be successful’. I also much prefer the concept expressed by Albert Einstein: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”.
Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
| 16/09/06 | | Eight Rules to Brilliant Brainstorming |
Andrew Hargadon and Bob Sutton did some research on brainstorming in the 90’s that has been written up in BusinessWeek recently. Bob says it’s a good representation of their work. For each heading I’ve included here there is a paragraph of detail in the BusinessWeek article.
- Use brainstorming to combine and extend ideas, not just harvest them
- Don’t bother if people live in fear
- Do individual brainstorming before and after group sessions
- Brainstorming sessions are worthless unless ideas lead to action
- Brainstorming requires skill and experience both to do—and especially—to facilitate
- Brainstorming requires skill and experience both to do—and especially—to facilitate
- Brainstorming sessions can be used for more than just generating ideas
- Follow the rules, or don’t call it a brainstorm
The other article BusinessWeek ran is called The Truth about Brainstorming. Bob Sutton has a go at most academic research on brainstorming suggesting that it rarely reflects what really happens in the workplace and the idea that individual brainstorming if more effective that group efforts is nonsense.
[via Bob Sutton]
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 8/09/06 | | On noticing |
The range of what we see and do
Is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
That we fail to notice,
There is little we can do
To change
Until we notice
How failing to notice
Shapes our thoughts and deeds.
by R.D.Laing
In a Foreword by Stephen Covey for Alex Pattakos, Prisoners of Our Thoughts, Viktor Frankl’s Principals at Work. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004.
[Thanks to Charles Savage]
Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack
| 27/08/06 | | Metaphor-Elicitation Technique |
I’m reading Gerald Zaltman’s How Customers Think. I started from the back because I was attracted to the chapters on story, metaphor and memory. But this morning I starting reading about Zaltman’s metaphor-elicitation technique (MET). It reminded me of Repertory Grid in that it’s an interview technique which uses one idea, or trigger, to probe for related ideas. Here is a cut down version of how Zaltman describes the process (p. 102–103).
The process can start with an image (or it could be a movie clip, a story, a product) that has some level of ambiguity or can be read in multiple ways (which probably means just about any image you like). I use this one in our anecdote circle training because when I ask ‘What’s happening in this picture?’ the answers are always in the form of a story.
Using the MET, the interviewer would ask questions Zaltman calls an Image Description Probe, such as:
Can you describe this image for me? What do you see here?
I see two girls looking at a hat. One is really interested in the contents while the other has her hands behind her back. The girl in the light green dress is bending over with her hands together. The hat seems to have some critters in it—perhaps rats.
Once the interviewee has described the picture and immersed themselves in the image the interviewer asks the introductory probe:
And how does this image relate to your thoughts and feelings about being a consultant within this corporation?
The hat and its contents reminds me of the constant need to produce results and the light green girl is acting like the many senior managers in the organisation who look disdainfully at the output of all our hard work. You can see that the dark green girl is not happy about the situation and might be willing light green girl to put her hands into the hat full of rats in the hope she will be bitten.
Could you tell me more about the hat?
As consultants we are instructed to generate the best hats possible and we are definitely proud of our work yet we tend to be given ridiculous timelines and never enough resources to do the job properly. Mind you when a hat is created all our peers gather and congratulate the hat makers on their work. It’s invariably a team effort.
More open questions follow probing various aspects of the metaphor that has been created by the interviewee in relation to the picture you have shown.
Zaltman encourages the interviewer to probe rather than prompt. Probes “enable participants to respond in multiple, often unexpected, ways, while [prompting] prohibits discovery by focusing the participant’s attention on the interviewer’s assumptions and hypotheses.” (p. 108)
We take a similar line when helping people craft anecdote-eliciting questions and when running anecdote circles. The facilitators role is to probe with open questions and then let the participants help one another remember stories through association. The difference with anecdote circles is that it is done in a group and it’s designed to collect stories.
Zaltman, G. (2003). How Customers Think: Essential Insights Into the Mind of the Market. Boston, Harvard Business School Press.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 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]
Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack
| 21/08/06 | | Sensemaking using heuristics |
Sensemaking is described as how we make sense of the world so we can act meaningfully in it. One of the ways we make sense is to apply simple rules of thumb (heuristics) to common situations. I was re-reading The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul by Douglas Adams (of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fame) and noticed a description of a particularly unconventional heurisitic applied by the main character, Dirk Gently, when he got lost while driving:
“There is a school of thought which says that you should consult a map on these occasions, but to such people I say, ‘Ha! What if you have no map to consult? What if you have a map but it’s of the Dordogne?’ My own strategy is to find a car, or the nearest equivalent, which looks as if it knows where it’s going and follow it. I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but I often end up somewhere that I needed to be.”1
This heuristic certainly worked for our hero Dirk in the book, but I am not sure I will be rushing out to try it the next (inevitable) time I get lost in Sydney…
1. Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, Pan Books, London, 1989, p121.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 6/08/06 | | Sensemaking starts with noticing |
Oscar Wilde once remarked, “there was no fog in London before Whistler painted it.” Wilde was referring to Whistler’s, Chelsea Wharf, and making the point that we can easily fail to see what’s staring us in the face until something or some experience brings it into sharp focus. This happened to me just the other week. I was reading Steve Denning’s The Leaders Guide to Storytelling in preparation for the teleconference call John Smith had organised with Steve and CPSquare members. I was reading the section on introducing yourself using a story when I got side-tracked (see my post on Yak shaving to see what being side-tracked is really like) and began to look for a reference to dead metaphors. I remembered that George Orwell had written on this topic and thought it was in his essay, Why I Write. So I re-read the essay, which I’d read a few times before, and noticed that his first few paragraphs were a series of anecdotes aimed at introducing himself just like Steve suggested in his book. Wow, never seen it before. Just shows you the power of context in influencing what people are able to see and take in.
Karl Weick says that seeing and noticing are the pre-requisites to sensemaking. Brenda Dervin has a similar perspective. So our challenge in business is to create situations where new patterns are discernible. We’ve talked about how stories help us see new patterns but what else can we do? Here is my list of perspective lenses I think we can apply:
- New eyes—introduce people with different background and way of seeing the world and new patterns become evident. For example, the Victorian Department of Primary Industries has introduced an agent provocateur program as part of their innovation initiatives.
- New frameworks—a powerful new framework will help you see the world differently. I remember the first time I saw they Cynefin framework and from that day on I could see ‘complex’ phenomena.
- New experiences—people can talk about how something works but until you experience it the effects are typically limited.
- New combinations—Darwin famously envisaged a model of evolution via natural selection by combining Malthusian economics and countless observation made on the Beagle.
After reading Alain de Botton’s short essay On the Pleasures of Sadness I was reminded that New Surroundings provides another excellent lens. de Botton has a fondness for train travel when he’s in search for new ideas because,
“Of all modes of transport, the train is perhaps the best aid to thought: the views have none of the potential monotony of those on a ship or plane, they move fast enough for us not to get exasperated but slowly enough to allow us to identify objects.”
So when we want our business leaders to see new patterns let’s get them away from the familiar day-to-day environment and run our workshops and meetings in new and surprising locations. This doesn’t have to be extravagant, just different.
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
| 2/08/06 | | An SNA Sensemaking Activity- Preparing people to see |
We’ve learnt that for SNA to be effective in group situations there is real value in preparing people for what they may see within typical social network maps. The “hubs and bridges expectations warm-up” is one of our sensemaking processes useful for such preparation. This warm up activity aims to prepare groups for sensemaking in a productive and non-confrontational way.
This activity uses as its basis the broader Delphi process of brainstorming, narrowing down and ranking. Unlike the traditional Delphi approach which usually occurs anonymously and asynchronously, this method is usually done in a group setting and resembles Bob Dick's description of Delphi Face-to-Face. This process does not require the same rigour which the typical Delphi process employs as the purpose of this activity is to provide a sensemaking activity complimentary to the more formal activities associated with a typical social network analysis.
The Hubs and Bridges expectations warm-up
This process can work for 3-50 people. It is assumed that people are at tables with 5-7 people per table at Step 2. Materials required: Post-its, A4 template, Butchers Paper, Red dots = 6 per participant. Total time: 20-30 mins
Step 1: Introduce the group to the Hubs and Bridges concept
Time: 5-7 mins
Introduce people to what a 'hub' is and what a 'bridge' is in social network analysis. Experientially, this can be done using sociometry "networks in action" warmup exercises.
Step 2: Brainstorm and narrow down the list of Hubs and Bridges at table level
Time: 5-7 mins
First invite participants to privately spend 2-3 minutes brainstorm a list of people who they think would be key Hubs and Bridges in a given context. The context may be about information flow, problem solving, knowledge hoarding etc. Tables then are to work together to compile a list containing all the brainstormed Hubs and Bridges. From the compiled list, each table is to come to a consensus of their 5 most important Hubs and Bridges. No ranking required here, simply the 5 most important Hubs and Bridges. This can be decided through vote, discussion or any other means which the table decides.
Step 3: Feedback and group voting of narrowed down lists
Time: 10-15 mins
Invite each table to provide its list of 5 most important Hubs and Bridges. Compile this onto 2 large sheets of butchers paper (one for Hubs one for Bridges) with two columns: Name and Vote. Once compiled, invite the group to vote for the Hubs and Bridges they think would be the most important in the given context. Tally the votes. The groups expectation of who the Hubs and Bridges is now available for broader conversation and discussion.
Note: The 5 most important, could also be the 5 most … valued, key, influential,…
You might also be interested in my squidoo lens on Social Network Analysis and Sensemaking.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 31/07/06 | | Getting into a sensemaking mindset |
Brenda Dervin recently made a few points in her masterclass that have stuck in my mind. Like: when it comes to sensemaking, what matters is the moment of action. There is no reality, only reality-making.
It seems that taking a sensemaking approach requires getting into a sensemaking mindset.
How about this zen koan to help you get into a sensemaking mindset….
- Q: How long should you stay at something?
- A: However long it takes to get what you came for.
- Q: How do you decide what you came for?
- A: You don’t, you discover it.
- Q: How do you discover it?
- A: You notice what isn’t there anymore when you feel like leaving.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 21/07/06 | | Story spines for sensemaking |
The “story spine” is a natural sensemaking device. Yesterday, one of my good friends Viv was telling me about a workshop experience she went through with a very polarized community where there was alot of conflict and turmoil in the room. As a way to get the group working towards a vision she introduced the story spine approach for story telling. Viv found the story spine really powerful, not to mention cathartic.
The story spine follows a pattern like:
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)
Once participants have been introduced to the story spine you can then invite them to tell a story using the story spine framework.
With my new found appreciation of Brenda Dervin’s sensemaking work it makes sense why the story spine is a fantastic sensemaking device. As Brenda explains, her work around sensemaking builds on the metaphor of a person finding themselves in a certain situation where to get to the place they want to be they have to cross a bridge. Taking a sensemaking lens to the situation, gap and outcome results in particular sensemaking questions like: “What brought you to this point?”, “What questions or muddles do you have?” and “What helps have you had?”. It appears, that in one fell swoop, the story spine brings this all into focus. “Once upon a time” helps to locate the situation. “But one day…” helps to locate the gap. “Ever since then…” brings the outcome to fruition.
Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack
| 15/07/06 | | A question of balance |
For centuries (until the 1950’s), scientists believed that the left side of our brains (the rational, analytical, logical side) was the crucial side; the side that made us human. All sorts of evidence was collected to support this view. Our organisations are often reflections of this type of thinking: obviously we needed all sorts of rules, systems and procedures to adequately control things. So, this is where the emphasis has been and the result is a system out of balance.
Increasingly our organisations are realising that numbers are not enough in an increasingly complex world. They are realising that the ‘bossy, know-it-all’ left brain approach, and its associated capabilites, are a necessary but insufficient condition for success. The language of complexity teaches us that complex problems cannot be ‘analysed and solved’ per se and that new approaches are required to supplement (not replace) our problem solving capabilities.
Apart from helping organisations to tackle complex problems, building the organisation’s right brain capabilities creates the conditions for insight and empowerment and can help create a richer and more rewarding work experience. Used in combination with traditional approaches, the techniques that we use such as business narrative, most significant change, social network analysis, storytelling, communities of practice (and others) can enhance the ability to tackle intractable problems, achieve meaningful change….and to help restore balance to the ways we think about and manage our organisations.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 10/07/06 | | The importance of dialogue |
Shawn’s series of posts on finding expertise has reminded me of one of my favourite quotes: an anthropologist’s description of an agricultural North American tribe from David Bohm’s book On Dialogue:
Dialogue provides shared meaning and empowers people. With the number of meetings in most organisations it is not unreasonable that we should expect high levels of shared meaning and empowerment…but this doesn’t appear to be the case. What is it that prevents our meetings from enabling us to engage in dialogue?
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
| 17/06/06 | | Accidental heroes |
One of my favourite quotes is:
“Where observation is concerned, chance favours only the prepared mind.” Louis Pasteur (1900)
Sensemaking is about preparing one’s mind. It starts with noticing things which are only noticeable when you’re prepared to see them. Our minds are prepared by a combination of experience and reflection. Take a look at this list of accidental discoveries. In each case it seems like a minor shift in perspective occurs for the discovery to be made. It seems to me, reading between the lines, that the discoverers where people who first had the ability (permission) to explore, an insatiable curiosity and through years of effort and persistence made a breakthrough. These conditions seem to be rare in organisations yet many leaders extol the virtues of innovation without preparing the environment for discovery.
Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack
| 28/05/06 | | Designing interventions requires new perspectives |
Designing interventions for complex environments requires the designers to see new patterns. Before I elaborate on this idea here is a story Steve Denning told today on the workingstories email list.
John Seely Brown sometimes tells a story (which he says is true) of a board meeting of a Fortune 100 corporation that took place one evening in downtown San Francisco in a neighborhood that had become quite dicey, with many vagrants and homeless people hanging around.
The directors were just sitting down to a luxurious meal in the building where the meeting was taking place. when there was a loud knocking on the door. The knocking was increasingly loud and menacing, and the board members suggested to their host that it might be wise to ignore it and not open the door.
But the host said no, it would be fine: the people in the neighborhood meant no harm. So he opened the door and indeed there were a couple of homeless men, ill-kempt, poorly dressed, and none-too-clean. They said that they were hungry and needed food.
To the horror of the board members, the host invited them in, and said, Sure, we’ve got a lot of good food. Come on in. Sit down. Make yourself at home.
So the homeless men sat down at the table and started greedily gobbling up the caviar, the foie gras, the salmon, the lobster and the rest.
Finally, when the homeless men reached a pause in their eating, they turned to the alarmed board members and asked: where did all this food come from? How come they had so much expensive food on hand?
The board members answered hesitantly that they were the board members of a big corporation and they were having an important meeting and food was a normal accompaniment of such meetings.
And the homeless men started asking, why don’t you share some of this with people like us? We are hungry. We need food. Would you really miss it if you shared some of it with us? What does your company do? Don't your ads say that you care about people like us?
The conversation went on like this for a while, as the homeless men’s questions became more and more insistent – why should the board members have all this food and we have none? Is this fair? Is this reasonable?
The board members’ answers became steadily more defensive.
After this had gone on for a while, and the board members became increasingly concerned as to how it was going to end, the host revealed that the homeless men were actors, whom the host had engaged, as a prelude to an item on the agenda about the board’s social responsibility.
JSB doesn't say what happened in the ensuing board discussion but my guess is that, whenever those board members saw homeless people after that, they viewed them with a different frame.
That’s one (rather elaborate) way to disrupt the frame.
The ability to see new patterns can be facilitated in a number of ways:
- New eyes—introduce people with different background and way of seeing the world and new patterns become evident
- New frameworks—a powerful new framework will help you see the world differently. I remember the first time I saw they Cynefin framework and from that day on I could see ‘complex’ phenomena.
- New experiences—people can talk about how something works but until you experience it the effects are typically limited.
- New combinations—Darwin famously envisaged a model of evolution via selection by combining Malthusian economics and countless observation made on the Beagle.
Our job in helping people design interventions is to create environments where new patterns can be seen. The above story is an excellent example of creating new experiences.
Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack
| 19/05/06 | | We will work harder to find good news |
Bad news travels fast and some argue that we learn best from our mistakes, but psychological research shows we will work harder, or a least wait longer, to receive good news.
Two psychologists, Peter Ditto and David Lopez, told subjects that they were being tested for a dangerous enzyme deficiency. Subjects placed a drop of saliva on a test strip and waited to see if it turned green. Some subjects were told that the strip would turn green if they had the deficiency, and others were told that the strip would turn green if they did not. In fact, the strip was just an ordinary piece of paper that never changed color.
So how long did subjects stare at the strip before accepting its conclusion? Those who were hoping to see the strip turn green waited a lot longer than those who were hoping not to. Good news may travel slowly, but people are willing to wait for it to arrive.
[via Decision Science News referring to a New York Times Op Ed]
Reference: Motivated Skepticism: Use of Differential Decision Criteria for Preferred and Nonpreferred Conclusions. Peter H. Ditto and David F. Lopez. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1992, Vol. 63, No. 4, 568-584.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 16/05/06 | | Intervention design - an example |
I’m always on the lookout for intervention design examples and I found one last week I think you’ll like. But before I describe it, remember what we mean by an intervention: a discrete action designed to improve the system but you can’t predict exactly how things are going to turn out. It’s not a project in the sense that there is a clear objective, and a set of milestones over sometimes lengthy periods. This example is from Pfeffer and Sutton’s Hard Facts, Dangerous Half Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management [pp. 116–117]
A classic demonstration of the power of external reinforcements was a study in the early 1970s at Emery Air Freight, a freight forwarder. Before the development of large package companies with their own airplanes, freight forwarders picked up packages and shipped them on airlines. T hey got a better rate to the extent the packages were placed in larger containers that were easier to handle. So Emery management wanted employees to put as many packages as possible into larger containers to cut freight costs. The company conducted a performance audit and found that, although managers thought they were using larger containers 90 percent of the time it was feasible, only 45 percent of the eligible packages were actually being put into larger containers. So the company announced a new program that provided rewards such as praise—not financial rewards—for improvement. On the first day, the proportion of packages placed in the larger containers increased to 95 percent in about 70 percent of the company’s offices. The speed of this overwhelming improvement suggests that a change in performance derived not just from the rewards that were offered, but also from the information provided that the current performance level was poor and this action—consolidating shipments—was important to the company.
Pfeffer and Sutton are careful to point out that rewards and recognition approaches don’t work in all cases. It’s one of the dangerous half truths they explore. In this case recognition is used to convey a message to staff about what is important to the company. I think it provides a useful pattern (one of many possibilities) for intervention design: identify a desired improvement that can be measured (of course many cannot—have a read of this) and heap praise on those people who are adopting the desired behaviours. For example, if you are a scientific organisation and are unhappy with the number and quality of the papers being published, management would communicate the importance of, for example, publication in tier 1 journals then heap praise on people who succeed in publishing their papers in these journals. This is a better option than just saying “we should provide better feedback and praise to our staff.”
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 11/05/06 | | SNA Sensemaking |
Social Network Analysis has spent alot of its evolution and development down in the weeds where the expert has been king. Crunching and analysing. Not surprising really. There are traps for young players in SNA and there is a clear role for someone like an expert to keep us clear of traps.
Eventually however, when the crunching and analysis has been worked through, which these days happens mostly through software, a delicate opportunity emerges to provide the visualisations and network maps to a group. A group of people such as senior leaders or managers, or even people from ‘the coal face’. Whomever, they are people who will then face the challenge of ‘making sense’ of the ‘data’.
Until now SNA as a field hasn’t had much to say about how groups can ‘make sense’ of social network maps. The sensemaking perspective has been missing. Maybe this is because, as I mentioned, there is a delicate opportunity to presenting network maps to groups. Delicate because social network maps contain very delicate information. People’s names. The opportunity is around moving beyond ‘the expert recommends’ and more towards ‘the group thinks’.
Whichever, as I discuss in our seminar, SNA sensemaking can provide a powerful way forward. A way to action.
Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
| 8/05/06 | | Mindfulness, categories and Jorge Borges |
Merlin Mann at 43 Folders points us to an interesting book called Mindfulness and makes reference to Jorge Borges’ (one of my favourite writers) famous list of 14 animal types (includes embalmed ones, stray dogs and those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush). Merlin points out that our ability to categorise and re-categorise is a fundamental skill.
Merlin’s post triggers a couple of thoughts. Richard Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought illustrates that westerners view the world differently from Asians: westerners are taught as children to see the world as nouns (look Johnny, a truck); Asians are taught to view the world as verbs (look Emiko, clapping). Yes, we all categorise but we should be mindful that different cultures do it differently.
Mindfulness is a word used extensively by Karl Weick. The sensemaking process begins when something is noticed and mindfulness enables us to notice what’s happening.
Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
| 8/05/06 | | Techniques to encourage dialogue |
Last week I suggested we needed more techniques that fostered deeper conversations in business. Well here is a new resource which will help you get up to speed on a range of group processes designed to encourage dialogue. The 86–page report was produced by the Pioneers of Change Associates and commissioned by the Nelson Mandela Foundation. The report describes the following techniques and many more:
- appreciative inquiry
- change lab
- circle
- deep democracy
- future search
- open space technology
- scenario planning
- sustained dialogue
- the world cafe
[thanks to Mary Alice Arthur for the pointer to this report—when will we see your blog MA?]
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 19/04/06 | | Facilitation for engineers and scientists |
It’s interesting how I’ve found myself drawn into discussion lately around the difficulties of facilitating engineers and scientists. If facilitating engineers and scientists is difficult, imagine then, the challenge of how to educate, train and inform engineers and scientists on ‘how to be more facilitative’. With many organisations now developing communities of practice to meet strategic knowledge management objectives such demands on scientific and engineering staff may be more common than you think. Given that ‘being facilitative’ is one of the requirements for successfully nurturing and developing communities of practice, how does one go about about being facilitative?
Of course, nothing is impossible. Scientists and engineers are at a disadvantage though. The big disadvantage I see is that scientists and engineers often live in fear of (publicly) asking stupid questions. When you have spent most of your life training to be ‘a problem solver’ or to ‘have the answer’ some light is shed on the problem of being facilitative. Being facilitative requires one to often ask what appears to be stupid questions, maybe even naive questions. At least I think so. If you’ve spent alot of your time, training and effort, being the one to answer questions, how hard is it going to be for you to ask “what do others think?”.
I think that being facilitative requires one to be happy with not knowing and yet maintain the desire to know. For group sensemaking this is a critical insight. If the facilitator is willing to live with the uncertainty of not knowing, which by the way is where you will find yourself spending alot of time as a facilitator, the group will find itself getting to better outcomes. Being happy with not knowing yet maintaining the desire to know sets up a great precondition for sensemaking. Dissonance. For a scientist and engineer who might presume to know, the possibility for group sensemaking immediately starts to close down.
As we have been finding from our reflective practice on language in facilitation, language is something which emerges from a mindset and there definitely appears to be a mindset which goes along with ‘being facilitative’. I’ve blogged before about what I think are foundational elements for facilitation, many of these reflect this mindset element.
Facilitation is more than just finding some great processes like you might at the citizen science toolbox and applying them. Though this is a great place to start. Facilitation is something you have to get your hands dirty with to learn. Action learning if you will. Once you start you will soon learn the power of empathy, asking stupid questions and laughing at yourself along the way.
Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack
| 30/03/06 | | 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.
Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack
| 30/03/06 | | The 1st Annual Symposium on Meaning Making in Organisations |
Mark, Andrew and I spent Monday and Tuesday at the Australian National University’s Symposium on Meaning Making in Organisations. The event was organised by Paul Atkins and Jennifer Garvey Berger and was a tremendous success—for one thing there were no presentations, only discussions. This event will be run again in September in Washington DC.
Many ideas percolated as a result. I began to understand that sensemaking is triggered by someone noticing something and the level of meaning is related to how much you care about what you’ve noticed; I learned about Robert Keagan’s theories of complexity of mind; we explored the relationship between group and individual sensemaking; I wondered whether the Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow was the opposite of sensemaking; sensemaking is knowledge creation; and dissonance seamed to be a characteristic of sensemaking.
Bob Dick made the following remark which seems to me as the essence of sensemaking: “I do my most creative things when I’m desperate and in action.”
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 21/01/06 | | Data Visualization |
Ever since reading Edward Tufte’s book Envisioning Information way back when I’ve been f
ascinated with how to best present complex information. So today I made a great find, a set of 12 charts by Karl Hartig. Each one can be downloaded as a PDF so you can get a really good look at it.
[via Guy Kawasaki]
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 13/01/06 | | Google's experimental decision market |
Last September I reviewed James Surowiecki’s book Wisdom of Crowds. At the end of the review I said:
I can understand why, as Surowiecki laments, few organisations have implemented group decision-making—because it removes power from those who have the authority and responsibility to implement the decisions.
So it was a pleasure to discover, a little belatedly perhaps, that Google is using decision markets to forecast things like “… product launch dates, new office openings, and many other things of strategic importance to Google. So far, more than a thousand Googlers have bid on 146 events in 43 different subject areas.”
As serendipity would have it I read The Google Story over the Christmas break and I can see why their culture supports this type of decision making tool; decision-making appears distributed and employees have opportunities to create new products. Like 3M of the past, Google encourages everyone to take 20% of their work time and pursue a pet project of their choosing.
It appears that the Google decision market is working well. There is a high correlation between the forecast and the eventual outcome. See Bo Cowgill’s chart.
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
| 28/11/05 | | Business users are set to by-pass IT departments |
I had lunch with Serafino De Simone at Microhelp last week. Serafino has been running his IT company since the 80’s and based on that experience he made the following observation:
The last couple of years is the first time where IT functionality is better at home than at work.
This trend will have some interesting impacts. Take for example the relationship between IT departments and an organisation’s business lines.
IT departments want stability regardless of the business maelstrom swirling about their head. Everything must be locked down and controlled. We can understand this desire. IT systems are complex and must work. But as a result the company’s IT products are multiple versions behind and new software phenomena like wikis, blogs, VOIP, video streaming are just too hard to contemplate. Yet our sophisticated business users freely use these products at home and the gap between what users expect and what is being delivered is only getting wider.
Unless IT departments become more flexible and responsive we will see many business people by-pass IT and directly subscribe to the online services which deliver the functionality they need. Just look at Basecamp (project management), Salesforce.com (sales process), Typepad (blogging), Survey Monkey (online surveys), Bloglines (blog reader) and you will see that these types of applications are proliferating.
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
| 22/11/05 | | Our tendency to categorise and the effect on sensemaking |
Patti over at 37 Days provides a brilliant and humorous description of Richard Nisbett’s work on how
westerners and Asians perceive the world differently. Her renditions of Dick and Jane stories are priceless. According to Nisbett our early years of language development consist of Western children being taught nouns while Asian children are taught verbs. And as a result westerners become obsessed with categorisation while our Asian neighbours are in tune to relationships. OK, perhaps these are broad generalisations but please indulge me for another minute. Here’s another one from Nisbett. What belongs better together, the chicken, grass or cow?
Apparently westerners tend to put the cow and the chicken together (they are both animals) and Asians put the cow with the grass or the chicken with the grass (cows and chickens eat grass).
When helping people design interventions it is important to be mindful of these tendencies to categorise or connect. Most of my work is with westerners and we do like to put things in boxes as quickly as we can. Our job in sensemaking is to help people resist categorising and keep the activities in a state of flux. This allows new things to emerge and helps us avoid snapping into the familiar patterns which constrain our thinking.
Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack
| 21/11/05 | | How do you design your questions for a Social Network Analysis? |
One of the key components to a social network analysis (SNA) is the designing of the questions.
Here are some examples of some questions often used in SNA*:
- Whom do you typically turn to for help in thinking through a new or challenging problem at work?
- Whom are you likely to turn to in order to discuss a new or innovative idea?
- Whom do you typically give work-related information?
- Whom do you turn to for input prior to making an important decision?
- Whom do you feel has contributed to your professional growth and development?
- Whom do you trust to keep your best interests in mind?
These listing of questions reflect all kinds of qualities like trust, communication flow, problem solving networks etc.
You can face a real dilemma however, if, once having designed the questions you get feedback like “we are not sure this survey should go across our teams” or even worse “ we don’t feel comfortable revealing our names in this survey so we would like to make it anonymous”.
Such problems bring up a really good, but maybe often overlooked point. How the group will actually make sense of your wonderful SNA questions? One approach to this conflict may lay in the use of our Power Law. Simply raise the power of the group that you are working with. Involve them, collaboratively, in a discussion around the design of the social network analysis.
(*-See The hidden power of social networks )
Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack
| 15/11/05 | | Knowledge mapping is sensemaking |
I’ve noticed an increased interest in knowledge mapping recently. A couple of tenders have been released, there’s talk about it on ActKM and some of our clients have engaged us to help them with the process. The other thing I’ve noticed is the misguided belief that a knowledge mapping exercise should create a single, one-off, accurate map.
Knowledge mapping should primarily be a sensemaking exercise where people are prompted to discover and consider their knowledge assets, discuss them, argue about them, decide which things or processes are important, and most importantly guide them to a point in order to take some action. Before starting mapping ensure the intention are clear because the map created will depend on its purpose. Some maps are social network charts, some are yellow-pages, while others are simply a matrix showing knowledge assets and their relationship to business processes. In many cases multiple maps are needed and every case it’s important to repeat knowledge mapping on a regular basis. Just like cartographic maps there is never a single map for every purpose. The world is too rich and varied, to include everything, if that was possible, would result in a noisy and confusing picture.
Denham Grey has created a wiki, which you are welcomed to join and contribute to, which provides an excellent starting point for a discussion of knowledge maps and mapping. I’ve started to contribute some of my perspectives on sensemaking and recognising that the process is just as important as the map. It would be great to see your contributions and perhaps we can create a useful artefact about knowledge mapping for our KM community.
At Anecdote our knowledge mapping process is based on a three papers Dave Snowden wrote in 2000 where he made the following thoughtful observation: asking someone what they know is a cruel question, it lacks context and is virtually impossible to answer meaningfully. Consequently, our first step in knowledge mapping involves collecting evidence for where important knowledge resides. For this job we use narrative techniques because contained within each story of how work gets done are pointers to important knowledge. “Last time we conducted a performance review we had to ask Jessica about how it was done in 2003. She’s our go to person for anything like that.” or “No one actually uses the database to identify folks to work on projects. We tend to chat to people who we’ve worked with in the past and update the database retrospectively. It keeps management happy.” Once the evidence is collected surveys and interviews can be used to flesh out what the knowledge looks and feels like. The final and vital step involves conducting a workshop of key players to make sense of the collected information. The purpose of the workshop is to identify which knowledge assets support key business process and using this information for the group to identify gaps or points where knowledge is at risk. From here new knowledge initiatives are identified. Knowledge mapping is often the first step in an overall knowledge improvement programme.
Snowden D (2000) Organic Knowledge Management - Part 1. Knowledge Management 3, 14-17.
Snowden D (2000) Organic Knowledge Management - Part 2. Knowledge Management 3, 11-14.
Snowden D (2000) Organic Knowledge Management - Part 3. Knowledge Management 3, 15-19.
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
| 5/11/05 | | Australian cartoonist |
We use cartoonists to illustrate archetypes as part of the sensemaking process. This is a fun activity which has the serious side of helping to illustrate an organisation’s culture through the depiction of prevalent archetypes. Finding good cartoonists can be tricky but here is a great place to start in Australia—the Australian Cartoonists’ Association. It is important to find performance cartoonists; people who can draw and redraw characters in front of an audience.
Thanks to my old friend David Pope for helping me find cartoonists over the years. I believe he has been nominated for another Stanley award this year. Good luck David.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 21/10/05 | | Sensemaking: the role of stories |
When something happens we like to tell others about it. This retelling of our experience often is done in the form of a story. “I can’t believe what Margaret just did. We have been working on the Acme project for 3 months and today she rings up, out of the blue, and resigns. I told her to get off the grass—no way! We spent an hour on the phone and it turns out she was unhappy with Jim’s attitude. Look like I will have to help build some bridges.”
This first telling enables us to hear what we think and upon reflection helps us make sense of what has just happened. The sensemaking process is also wrapped up in how we perceive our own character (our identity) and how we subtly portray our identity in the stories we tell. The sensemaking process is a learning process and stories seem to be the natural sensemaking mechanism. But perhaps more importantly is the need to have someone to tell your stories to; someone you trust.
Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack
| 18/10/05 | | Surprise in Social Settings |
Two powerful ways of making sense (in a weickien way) are:
- Using frameworks to ‘frame’ data
- Getting people to explain and explore surprises
The first technique of placing data into frameworks is common. Shawn posted a great example of such a technique here.
I like the surprise approach. Asking ‘what has surprised you’ is a great way to generate surprise as well as helping a group to make sense of what’s going on. It’s interesting that this approach doesn’t seem to work so well on lone individuals. For instance, if I ask you, “what has surprised you today”, you probably might struggle to come up with something surprising. Yet, be placed in a social setting and it seems that surprises are ripe to occur.
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
| 17/10/05 | | Seth's sensemaking on the web |
You can think of the act of sensemaking as discovering the new terrain as you are inventing it. A man who is certainly mapping and creating new terrain is Seth Godin. Seth has stated quite clearly his vision for the next version of web technologies.
I BELIEVE THAT WHEN YOU GO ONLINE, you don’t search. You don’t even find. Instead, you are usually on a quest to make sense.
To facilitate this sensemaking Seth is launching a new technology called Squidoo. The interesting thing about this new technology for facilitating sensemaking is that Karl Weick queried this in his book Sensemaking in Organisations . Weick says that “…perceptions of information technology might undermine the ability of that technology to facilitate sensemaking”. Maybe this is something for Seth to think about in his marketing strategies…
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
| 16/10/05 | | Sensemaking: mapping the terrain with one twist |
Brian Arthur’s quote is a classic and I like the metaphor of sensemaking as mapping the terrain. I would add one twist which was introduced to me by Stuart Kauffman, the idea that the terrain is made of rubber and every step you and everyone else takes deforms the terrain in new ways. Sensemaking is therefore an ongoing process.
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack
| 16/10/05 | | Great quote from Brian Arthur on sensemaking |
This has got to be one of the best quotes I’ve seen regarding sensemaking, from an article of Brian Arthur’s in the Harvard Business Review.
Imagine you are milling about in a large casino with the top figures in the high-tech-the Gates, Gerstners, and Groves of their industries. Over at one table, a game is starting called Multimedia. Over at another is a game called Web Services. In the corner is Electronic Banking. There are many such tables. You sit at one.
“How much to play?” you ask.
“Three billion,” the croupier replies.
“Who’ll be playing?” you ask.
“We won’t know until they show up,” he replies.
“What are the rules?”
“Those will emerge as the game unfolds”, says the croupier.
“What are my odds of winning?” you wonder
“We can’t say,” responds the house. “Do you still want to play?”
Arthur argues that, in this type of environment, sensemaking differentiates great leaders from average leaders. Great leaders are identified by “their ability to perceive the nature of the game and the rules by which it is played as they are playing it”. In other words, the act of sensemaking is discovering the new terrain as you are inventing it. In the very process of mapping the new terrain, you are creating it.
(thanks to andersonite‘s blog)
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
| 15/10/05 | | Making sense of sensemaking |
Sensemaking is an important part of the business that we do here at Anecdote. We’ve decided that over the next month we’ll blog about it. Maybe we’ll make some sense of sensemaking in the process… Stay tuned…