Richard Rummelt, in Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, opened my eyes to a simple test to help you see if you have effective strategic initiatives. But before I describe the test here's some context.

Crafting a strategy involves choosing a course of action to achieve desired outcomes over a set time period. An effective strategy makes real choices between competing approaches--as well as providing space for new possibilities to emerge. For example a company's might want to increase its market share. It might do this by increasing sales, buying competitors, expanding its geographic market or a myriad of other approaches. The strategic craft is to decide which approach to choose or combine and apply. There are always more than one way to achieve your desired outcomes and your strategy should describe the choices your company has made. A good choice is usually a well considered and often tough choice.

What you will often see, however, in most strategic plans, are initiatives that don't reflect a real choice. Here are a few examples:

We will provide great customer service--was there really a choice to provide poor customer service?

We will delight our clients--had we considered underwhelming them?

Empower our employees--not many companies succeed disempowering their employees no matter how many try

What are often portrayed as strategic initiatives are really the outcomes we are hoping to achieve. They don't reflect what we've decided to do and therefore don't provide an effective strategy.

So, the test is simply this: take a strategic initiative and consider the opposite. If the opposite is a nonsense then reconsider your strategic initiative and make a real choice. If, on the other hand, the opposite is a viable possibility then a real choice has been made, in which case employees will want to know why and that's where a strategic story is important.

I like to call this test of considering the opposite the Costanza gambit after the Seinfeld character who successfully employs the opposite as his new strategy for life. Check out this 3 minute clip of the show where George Costanza has his epiphany.

You can only act strategically, day in, day out, if you know your company's strategy. Here are five things that happen when you really do know it.

1. you know when to say 'no.'
2. you get better support from your colleagues--they are trying to achieve the same things
3. you can wing it with confidence--the strategy is your safety net
4. you can focus on doing the right things rather than just doing things right
5. you can act with more autonomy because you know where others are going, and autonomy is motivating

In using story-work to build a brand, engage employees, or for one of its many other purposes, organisations nearly always focus on storytelling. The meme is strong because the act of storytelling is so powerful. But to focus solely on this one aspect of story-work severely limits the benefits. The most valuable application of this technique combines storytelling with story-listening and story-triggering. Together, these processes create the conditions for enduring and healthy change.

Story-listening

Back in 2005, I introduced the readers of the Anecdote blog to the concept of story-listening (it might even have been the first time the term was used). Story-listening is the process of eliciting and collecting stories, helping groups to draw meaning from those stories, and then, most importantly from a business perspective, creating opportunities for the stories to inspire employees to take positive, transformational action.

Story-listening may sound passive, but it does not involve people merely sitting back and listening to their company's stories in the same way that they might enjoy their favourite podcasts. It is all about helping those who can most influence change understand what's really happening in their organisation, and then inspiring them to do something about it. All good business story-work is purposeful.

Let me give you an example. Earlier this year, one of Australia's biggest accounting firms contacted Anecdote for help. They'd just done their employee engagement survey, and while many parts of the business were in good shape, there were several areas that revealed a need for improvement. The problem, however, was that the survey results didn't make it clear what might be creating the lower engagement scores. Broad themes like reward and recognition, communication and leadership behaviour had been flagged, but the organisation remained uncertain as to exactly which behaviours needed changing - or, for that matter, which behaviours were working nicely.

We started the project by collecting stories from a good cross-section of the firm and managing them in our Zahmoo story bank. We then assembled a group of influential employees from across the business and ran a workshop to help them work out for themselves the patterns of behaviour they wanted to reinforce and the conduct they wanted to correct - the stories we'd collected gave the employees many concrete examples of specific behaviours that either helped or hindered employee engagement. Once the important patterns where identified, we helped the group to design targeted interventions that would prompt constructive, lasting change.

All the stories you hear at work reflect your organisation's culture. You cannot change this culture without changing the stories being told and retold in your workplace. Then, once you've initiated new behaviours, new stories will flow. Story-listening helps you become aware of the current corporate narratives - it helps you to clearly hear the dominant stories, the prevalent archetypes, the repeating plot lines. Most importantly, because you are working with stories, your feelings are engaged, and these feelings inspire you to take action. Story-listening gives you the essential ingredients for change: decisions makers who both understand what's going on AND who are emotionally moved to make a difference.

Story-triggering

We all act in accordance with our beliefs, attitudes and values, which together form our view of life - or in terms of organisational culture, our view of work. This view is shaped and reshaped by what happens to us and how we interpret those experiences, and we reinforce those interpretations by telling ourselves stories and acting in accordance with them.

One of the first projects we did at Anecdote was to investigate the issue of trust in a bank's call centre. The call centre manager told us that when she'd first joined the section, she'd held the strong belief that all she had to do to get something done was to simply ask someone to do it and get their verbal agreement. But within her first week on the job, a colleague pulled her aside and advised her that, to get anything done, she should really email the person she was tasking and document her request, cc-ing all the relevant managers to ensure there was an obvious paper trail. At first this seemed crazy to the manager, and it offended her belief in the personal, friendly and trusting management style she had cultivated over many years, so she refused to adopt this approach. However, within another three weeks, after a series of incidents, the manager was emailing all of her tasking requests.

The dominant story at this call centre was that if you just relied on face-to-face requests, your words would be twisted or ignored and the job wouldn't get done, so you needed to maintain a paper trail as evidence. The centre's manager lived this negative story, multiple times, and eventually adopted it in place of her optimistic personal conviction. This was a sign of a very unhealthy workplace. What needed to happen here was that the employees needed to be subjected to new experiences that generated a fresh, positive governing story, and this is exactly the objective of story-triggering.

The simplest way to trigger such stories is for an organisation's leaders - that is, leaders in the broadest sense of the word - to do remarkable things, things that other people will remark on. We saw this happen at another bank we worked with. The bank's new CEO had noticed that most of the meeting rooms in the company's headquarters were occupied all the time, but that a handful were usually empty. On closer inspection, he noticed that the empty rooms each had a sign on the door which read, "This room can only be booked by a General Manager." The CEO asked around to see if this was necessary and quickly decided it wasn't. He then personally went to each GM meeting room and tore down the notices, triggering a story that flew around the organisation.

This might seem like a small act and a trivial story. But, in fact, it fed into a much bigger narrative that the CEO was creating, which went along the lines of: "We are flattening our organisation and resources will be allocated to whoever needs them to deliver business outcomes, regardless of their level in the company."

The first step in successful story-triggering is for leaders to be mindful of their actions. Such purposefulness is easier said than done. Often a leader's intent doesn't match the lived experiences and perceptions of her colleagues. She might want to foster collaboration yet is seen as acting in ways that create competition. She will only be able to tell if she is on the right track by becoming aware of the stories that are being told about her; some story-listening might be required here.

The next step is for leaders to identify or engineer opportunities to do something remarkable, and to do it conspicuously. This might be as simple as a leader telling an authentic story that reveals something about them - in particular, something about how they really feel, rather than what they think. If this sounds wishy-washy, it isn't. In his book The Political Brain, neuroscientist and political pundit Drew Westen puts it this way, using the context of political campaigns:

"Campaigns aren't won with bags full of anything [e.g. policy promises]. They are won by candidates who can convince voters, through their words, intonation, body language, and actions, that they share their values, that they understand people like them, and that they inspire the nation or save it from danger."

One CEO we worked with punctuated each sentence of a sustainability policy he was presenting by smacking the projection screen with the back of his hand. By the end of the presentation, no-one was left in any doubt as to the fact that sustainability was important to him.

The psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey point out in their book Immunity to Change that we can also apply the idea of story-triggering at the individual level, helping people to create new stories for themselves which fulfil the prerequisites for behaviour change.

The usefulness of this approach became clear to me while I was conducting a workshop with 80 professors at an Australian university on ways to improve collaboration. As I began to make the point that two important behaviours for good collaboration were to make and keep promises and to speak your mind to colleagues with respect and good intent, I noticed a woman sitting at the back of the room. She had her arms firmly crossed and was shaking her head, clearly very unhappy with what I was saying. So I stopped my presentation and asked the woman if she would like to share what she was thinking with the rest of the group. Practically before I had finished my request, she said, "There is no way in the world you can be open and honest with a senior professor around here." Before I could comment, she went on to tell a mini story: "I once did what you are suggesting and I had to move departments."

Now, no amount of clever argument or telling of familiar stories would have changed that person's mind. She had obviously had an incredibly bad experience. The only way to help her gain a new insight would be to create an experience with a different result to what she was expecting, and to do this many times over. She would then have a new story that would in turn guide her future behaviour.

Storytelling

There are many ways to apply storytelling to your work setting. You can help your leaders to become better storytellers, and you can also begin to share stories of customer service or safety, or stories that convey your values, brand, service or product. But there is one particular type of storytelling that I'd like to focus on here, that which will help you bring your strategy to life.

As I've said in my paper, How to make your strategy stick with a strategic story [http://www.anecdote.com.au/whitepapers.php?wpid=23], the sad reality of strategies is that considerable effort is expended to create them, yet it's often the case that few people in an organisation know them. As a consequence, it is practically impossible for people to act strategically. Without the company strategy in mind, people won't know what to focus on, or what to say 'yes' or 'no' to, and they will become reliant on their managers for direction which, depending on the quality of the manager, can really curtail innovation and effectiveness. This is where strategic stories can help.

There are some misconceptions about strategic stories that we should clear up. Firstly, some people think that a strategic story is merely an immutable single story that must be conveyed unchanged in each telling. Of course, this common misunderstanding is far from the truth. One of our associates once helped a large postal service develop their strategic story, but before he'd had time to organise some sessions to explain how to use it, the story had found its way to the head of the parcels section, who promptly said there was no way he was going to parrot 'this script' or read it out to his guys. Our associate assured him that that wasn't the intention. Rather, the story had been designed to convey the meaning of the postal service's strategy via a mixture of context, emotion and facts, and with that meaning in mind, leaders would be encouraged to tell their own stories to illustrate the company's strategic directions.

A good strategic story is a framework of meaning that explains why an organisation's strategic directions have been selected. But it's also like a chord progression used by a jazz musician, in that within that progression, the musician is free improvise and adapt the music to suit their needs and the desires of the moment.

Another misconception about strategic stories is that they are crafted by the CEO and her team and communicated to everyone much like Moses heralded the Ten Commandments. On the contrary, it's important that the development of a strategic story is a participatory process that involves as many people as possible, both in its initial crafting and in the sharing of new stories about how the strategy is subsequently being lived out by employees.

Once you've developed a strategic story, you'll find that it wields tremendous power in clarifying a new strategy. Even if you already have a strategy in place, the strategic story process will often reveal misunderstandings about what the strategic directions actually mean, or disagreement among your leaders on what they should be. When we conducted separate interviews with each of the senior partners of a large consulting firm, we found them mostly in agreement about the company's strategic directions. During the strategic story process, however, we discovered major differences of opinion between them which required resolution before the process could be completed. Through some difficult but important conversations, the leaders reached agreement and now have an even stronger resolve to pursue their strategy. Unfortunately, too many organisations avoid these tough discussions or just lack the trigger and then the process to pursue them effectively. Instead, they mistakenly continue working with a completely misaligned view of their strategy.

A strategic story is memorable, adaptable and imbued with meaning. It helps everyone in an organisation to make sense of what's happening in the business. Done well, a strategic story provides a real competitive advantage.

Bringing it all together

The combination of story-listening, story-triggering and storytelling magnifies the impact of story-work far beyond that achieved through the use of a single story approach. Organisations often start with story-listening, to find out what's really happening in the workplace and to help employees work out what they need to do. Then storytelling is used to increase the ability of leaders to connect with their colleagues and inspire them. While we are all natural storytellers - I'm writing this in a cafe and the guys at the next table are sharing one story after another - we often need to build our confidence to tell stories in a work setting. This is because we've become used to merely voicing our opinions at work, rather than showing our hearts. But employees want to know what their leaders stand for, and those leaders' actions and stories are a useful guide. Once an organisation knows what is happening within it, albeit with an awareness that you can never know it all, then story-triggering is used to prompt the telling of new stories that will pave the way for a new means of acting.

If you're already applying a story technique to your organisation, then you're well placed to broaden your approach and gain the benefits of using all three story-work modes. If you're just starting out, then you have a great opportunity to distinguish yourself from your competitors by using a comprehensive story approach to improve the way you work. You'll be amazed at the business results.

We have been helping organisations transform their strategies into concrete and memorable narratives for quite a few years now. In every organisation we've worked with - no exceptions - there have been powerful stories already circulating in the organisation that run counter to the new strategy. In most cases, these stories have been strong enough to significantly undermine the extent to which the strategy will be believed and acted on. These anti-stories need to be identified and tackled.

We've noticed a few patterns; about the nature of these 'anti-stories' and what seems to work in tackling them. Kevin and I have attempted to capture what we have learned about tackling anti-stories in a new article that you can access here

We love to hear about any anti-stories in your organisation and if you tackled them, how did you do it and what happened?

It's quite possible you'll lose your job as CEO if you are unable to persuasively communicate your company's strategy. Léo Apotheker, the recently fired CEO of Hewlett-Packard, has just learned this lesson.

Mr Apotheker was appointed CEO of HP in October 2010 less then a year before he was let go. Before HP, Apotheker was CEO of SAP at the end of a 20 year career with the German software giant. He left SAP under a cloud and in a memo SAP issued to its employees on his departure he said, "My communication towards you was not always optimal." This should have rung some alarm bells. 1

After about 5 months in the job (March 2011) Mr Apotheker announced the company strategy. They were going to expand into the cloud business, build out its software business, open up an app store and reinvest in R&D. The aim was to lift profit margins. They would move into business analytics. He promised to take a conservative approach suggesting there wouldn't be the massive company purchases like the Compaq or EDS buy outs HP had done in the past. 2

In August 2011 Mr Apotheker announces that HP will purchase British software company Autonomy for just over $10 billion and that he is considering selling the PC business.

In September 2011 Mr Apotheker is replaced with eBay's celebrity CEO Meg Whitman. The HP stock price during Mr Apotheker reign falls from $46 to $25.

Of course this is a high level telling of a CEO's demise which has many more twists and turns including the fanfare announcement of a new tablet to rival the iPad that was eventually withdrawn from sale only weeks after its launch. The important points to note in terms of communicating a strategy are these:

• Massive changes in mind are going to hurt you. Mr Apotheker suggested they weren't going on a spending spree then announces its third biggest purchase. Our Prime Minister in Australia, Julia Gillard, is suffering a similar fate. On election she promised not to introduce a tax on carbon. As of last week the Parliament has voted in a tax on Carbon (something I support by the way) and she has been crucified for it.
• A good strategy means something is going to change. That means there will be people who are strong supporters of the old way of doing things. The misunderstood Machiavelli put it this way, "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." Telling everyone you might sell your PC business only creates uncertainty. IBM pursued the same strategy of selling their PC business to the Chinese company Lenovo. IBM, however, sold the PC division before announcing it to the world. Sometimes its better to rip the band-aid off quickly.

The effectiveness of HP strategic story Mr Apotheker told (and there was a good chance he didn't actually tell a story) comes from not just what's in the story, its believability and novelty, but also how it is told and whether it becomes a story worth listening to, remembering, retelling and acting upon. Add to this the importance of consistency. From all accounts Mr Apotheker failed at each step. Now let's see how Meg Whitman fairs.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/09/business/09nocera.html
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/technology/15hewlett.htm

Steve Jobs introduced iCloud at Apple’s WorldWide Developers Conference in June 2011 . iCloud is Apple’s ‘next big thing’. After explaining the iCloud concept, Steve says, “Now, you might ask ‘why should I believe them – they’re the ones that brought me MobileMe?’” The audience laughs uproariously. Everyone in the audience knows that MobileMe is pretty much the opposite of Apple’s reputation for user-friendliness. It just doesn’t work. Steve continues. “It wasn’t our finest hour. Let me just say that. But we’ve learned a lot.”

Acknowledging an uncomfortable truth goes a long way to removing its power. If everyone knows the story, ignoring it increases it power. Tackling these anti-stories (the stories in your organisation that work against your strategy) is vital.

But there is a downside of 'running down' MobileMe. There are many people in apple who have invested a lot of their energy and enthusiasm into MobileMe and hearing this public admission is probably uncomfortable or even painful for them. For this reason, most organisational communication overlooks the negatives and avoids risking upsetting anyone. The resultant messages have a 'pollyanna' feel to them that undermine their credibility.

We are working with many organisations to develop their strategic stories and find one of our key roles is helping them find and maintain the courage to say the tough things. Kevin and I are writing a paper on this at the moment reflecting on the lessons of our projects in the past few years. We'll blog about it when we finish.

How do you get your people to think about what the future could be, in a way that inspires them and starts to spark action, but also takes into account the simple fact that the future is unpredictable?

I was reminded of this challenge, yet again, last week.

We were working with a client on developing a session for a two day leadership conference focussing on bringing their strategy to life. As we were throwing round ideas on the types of things we could do, someone suggested an exercise that involved the participants spending time writing a magazine article about how things are for that organisation in 5 years time.

This triggered a recollection when we did a similar thing when I was working in the UK for the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). I was involved in planning and running a series of workshops for the management population of my division, working with American management guru Noel Tichy to bring his concept of " cycle of leadership to life. These were 2 day courses, and we ended up running them for nearly 5000 leaders, over a two year period in 2006 and 2007.

On day two there was an exercise where everyone had to draft a magazine article, for the leading business magazine The Economist, with these instructions:

You are assigned to write a cover story for the Economist - dated September 21st, 2012. The story is about the dramatic transformation of RBS, and how through your leadership and outstanding execution, RBS is achieving unprecedented success. The article should be written as if it were 2012 and should discuss the challenges RBS has overcome, how that was done and what the business now looks like.

Now to understand the rest of this story you need to know that RBS during that time was one of the biggest and most successful companies in the world. In 2005 it announced a profit of $A10.27bn, up 14% from the year before, and in
2006 the profit increased another 16% to $A13.69bn. By 2007 the profit stood at a very impressive A$15.33bn and the share price stood at $A8.94.

It was held up as a major success story in the UK corporate world, and its Chief Executive, Sir Fred Goodwin, who had been knighted in 2004, was a darling of Wall Street and the city in London. The feeling was that we could do no wrong, the business would just keep growing and growing, and become even more and more successful.

People spend an hour crafting these beautiful magazine articles talking about RBS and its success five years in the future. They then worked in three's sharing each other stories, before three or four of the best ones were shared with the whole group. I remember they talked about things like how RBS now had 500,000 staff (up from its 120,000 at the time), that its market share has gone through the roof (i.e. its share of the credit card market was now 80%, up from 20%), that the world's most innovative companies came to RBS to learn how to do it, and that its profit had just hit A$30bn a year.

At the time I thought the exercise was very useful. It created energy in the room, made people feel good about themselves and the organisation and all of what was mentioned seemed realistic and achievable.

On the 19 January 2009, RBS announced a loss of AS41.65bn, the biggest ever annual loss in UK corporate history. On that same day the British Government increased its holding in the bank to 70%, and the share price stood at less than 14 cents. Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs, businesses within the RBS Group were sold and Sir Fred resigned, he was vilified by the British press, and his house was even attacked by angry protestors.

There is no way in 2006 or 2007 that we could see this downfall happening. It was completely realistic to think of continued success and global domination. The exercise seemed to do exactly what Tichy had wanted it to do, and people were still talking about months after the events. But every single prediction that 5000 people made about the future proved to be wrong.

How do you get your people to think about the future, and what it could be, but which also takes into account its unpredictability? How do you manage and deal with that paradox? Was the exercise we did at RBS 'wrong', or did it achieve what it wanted, if its purpose was to get people excited about RBS' future, and reinforced to them why they wanted to be there. Is it more of an engagement technique than a strategic visioning exercise?

I would really like to hear your views on exercises like this and your experiences of dealing with the challenge of trying to envisage a rapidly changing, unpredictable future and the value in doing so.

“A company without a story is usually a company without a strategy.”
Ben Horowitz, entrepreneur and investor¹

Steve Jobs bounces onto the stage and grabs the slide changer from his colleague with a friendly “Thanks Scott”. He’s looking thin and grey, illness having taken its toll, but his energy remains boundless. It’s the 2011 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference and Steve is about to announce a change in strategy for his company. The 1000-plus crowd cheers as he steps into the spotlight and then falls silent, hanging on his next utterance.

“About 10 years ago we had one of our most important insights, and that was the PC was gonna become the digital hub for your digital life.” With these words, Steve begins his strategic story.

A recent global study of 450 enterprises found that 80% of those companies felt their people did not understand their strategies very well.² It’s the dirty little secret shared by so many companies: ask any employee about your strategy, including the executive team, and they’ll lunge for a document that tells them. It’s rarely embedded in their minds and, as a result, the espoused strategy does not influence day-to-day decision-making. Given the effort applied to strategy development, there is a massive disconnect here. The opportunity to reconnect a firm with its strategy lies in how this strategy is communicated and understood.

There are a number of ways of conveying your organisation’s strategy. A popular approach is to craft a beautiful-looking PowerPoint presentation and email it to all your team leaders, with instructions to present it to their teams. The head of strategy for one Australia’s iconic brands once told me he happened to sit in on one of these talks and witnessed a team leader presenting a slide pack. It went something like this: “OK, HQ has asked me to tell you about (clicks to the first slide) … ah yes, our strategy. (clicks to the next slide and reads out the contents, then clicks again, pauses, and says:) Not sure what this means …” (clicks to the next slide). The audience slid into boredom. The talk failed to engage the team and left them none the wiser about the strategy and why the company was taking that approach. In fact, they were probably more cynical about and disengaged from the company than they had been before they’d sat down.

So sure, emailing a slide pack is easy, but in most cases it’s next to useless. It often achieves the opposite of what you want.

Another popular method is the CEO roadshow. The CEO visits each company site and presents the slide pack herself. This act is symbolic. It shows that the CEO really cares about the strategy and wants everyone to know about it, so it must be important. The audience watches intently to see how she presents the strategy, to see if she really believes it, if she really cares about it. Of course, the CEO is also there to answer questions, but no-one dares ask one in such an open forum.

Sadly, the result is often similar to what was observed by the head of strategy mentioned earlier. In kicking off a strategy session, a department head at a well-known bank asked a roomful of people, “So, who can tell me about our strategy?” Nothing. “OK, just one of the 12 items then.&rldquo; Still nothing. “So, no-one can remember any of the 12 things I have just travelled around all our sites talking about?” Silence.

Slide pack-driven presentations typically contain lots of bullet points and graphs and facts, but because these are not presented within an overarching narrative, it’s hard for the audience to join the dots. The audience forgets the information almost as soon as it files out of the auditorium because the presentation lacks a memorable story.

A key question people often ask when they hear about a new strategy is “Why?” “Why are we focusing on acquisition?” “Why are we outsourcing?” “Why are we demoting the Mac to the level of an iPhone or iPad?” A story best answers these “Why?” questions because it tells us what caused the change and what’s going to happen next – the strategy. A story provides the context for a strategy, making it meaningful and allowing it to connect with other company stories employees may have in their minds.

Here’s an example of a strategic story that was told to me at an executive story training session for a telecommunications company in Malaysia. The organisation’s leader was listening to my explanation of a strategic story when he suddenly jumped up and said: “I get it. Here’s our story. Over the last 10 years we’ve been focused on building mobile coverage. Our revenues have steadily increased but our infrastructure costs are rising faster. In 2 years time our infrastructure costs will exceed revenue. That’s why we’re now moving to collaborate and share infrastructure with our competitors and putting our efforts into competing on what runs on our mobile network.”

Why was this company collaborating with their competitors on infrastructure? Because its infrastructure costs were going through the roof. A simple yet effective story helped us understand why.

Strategic stories are powerful because people can picture them, remember them and retell them. Well-developed stories not only answer the “Why?” questions but also convey emotion in a way that inspires people to take action in accordance with the new strategy.

Developing an effective strategic story requires some work, primarily by the members of the executive team, who will often have a variety of views about what the company strategy actually is. It’s crucial that the responsibility for the story is not outsourced to the strategy department or, even worse, given to a creative agency. The leaders of the company must firstly clarify their own understandings of the strategy. They must then own both the strategy and the story that communicates it. Finally, they must not merely be comfortable telling that story – they must relish doing so.

One of the challenges faced by executives is to overcome the desire to get the words of the story absolutely perfect, as if the next Pulitzer Prize winner is being written. The story should instead be written to suit oral retellings, where the spine of the story will remain unchanged but the exact wording will be chosen by the speaker. These choices will be guided by the context and purpose of the story telling. Sometimes the telling will be long, sometimes it will be short, or it will focus on one part of the business, or on an internal story, or an external one … Stories have a tremendous capacity for adaptation.

Another challenge faced by executives is the desire to only talk about what’s working well. The problem with that, however, is that a pollyanna story – where everything is good and nothing ever goes wrong – is never believed for long, if at all. Eventually, everyone will see it as merely corporate spin. Steve Jobs does not make this mistake at the developers conference. Part-way through his telling of the strategic story that introduces iCloud, he admits the failings of the now superseded software MobileMe, saying, “It wasn’t our finest hour.”³ The crowd roars with laughter. There is a sense of relief that he hasn’t tried to sweep the failure under the carpet. His strategic story gains credibility.

One of the simplest ways of working out what failings to include in your strategic story is to explore the possible anti-tales that might be told to discredit your story. A key lesson in story work is that you can’t beat a good story with fact; you can only beat a good story with a better story. A strong example of this was provided by a large government department that we helped to develop a strategic story. This department had just merged with another department and their strategic story highlighted the advantages of the integration. When we asked the executives to tell us some anti-stories, they described how the department had attempted another merger a decade ago but it had only lasted a couple of years. They called it the big divorce, and there were still fears that it might happen again. It was clear we needed to face up to that fact in the department’s strategic story.

Once an executive team can tell their strategic story, replete with personal anecdotes that really bring the story to life, they then need to get the rest of their organisation involved in telling it. It’s important to achieve this through both bottom-up and top-down approaches, and to allow for variations of the story to emerge that suit different parts of the business while maintaining the story’s core.

Large company gatherings are a perfect time to introduce a strategic story. Immersing many people in a story at the same time results in an aspect of group psychology called ‘social proof’ – the social pressure that tells us that if other people are doing something, it is safe for us to do the same thing. A large event provides the perfect forum for executives to present their story and for the participants to share their own anecdotes, which can reinforce and illustrate the strategy. This also allows concerns and anecdotes which contradict or undermine the strategic story to surface and be dealt with.

Companies can develop and embed strategic stories at any level of the organisation. There can be a company-wide strategic story or one for a particular business division. CIOs are beginning to invest in developing strategic stories to bring their IT strategies to life so it makes sense for CEOs, other executives and board members.

An organisation’s culture is defined by the stories employees, customers, partners and all the many stakeholders tell. So if you want to change your company’s culture, you must therefore change the stories people tell. Your strategic story will become entwined in your culture, providing an overarching narrative that triggers new stories while also being modified by what happens in the organisation. The strategic story is alive because it is not merely the words that the executive team assemble and speak. Rather, the strategic story is fed by the multitudinous actions people take in the organisation.

Edgar Schein noted nearly a decade ago that there are relatively few things leaders do that inordinately affect organisational culture:⁴

• what leaders pay attention to, measure and control on a regular basis
• how leaders react to critical incidents and organisational crises
• how leaders allocate resources
• deliberate role modelling, teaching and coaching
• how leaders allocate rewards and status
• how leaders recruit, select, promote and excommunicate.

Each of these actions will trigger stories. Leaders must be mindful that their actions are more important in sustaining a strategic story than anything they say, because when people have a choice between believing a stated strategic story or the actions of their leaders, they will always take more notice of what the leaders do. The message for leaders, then, is that they should align their decisions and behaviours with their company strategy and the strategic story that describes it, or they will see their strategic efforts fail. Strategy implementation is change management.

It’s clear that creating an effective strategic story, one with real impact, involves much more than simply crafting and then telling a compelling story. It involves an executive team developing the strategic story themselves so that they can own it. It involves that team being comfortable with telling the story and weaving their own experiences through it. And most importantly, it involves everyone in the organisation learning and telling their own versions of the strategic story so that they all own it and act to support and build on it.

Steve Jobs paces back and forth across the stage, painting word pictures of where Apple has come from, why a change in strategy is needed, and where the company will now be heading. He talks as if it has already come to pass. Eventually he brings up his last slide, takes a deep breath, and finishes his story: “So that is iCloud.”

References

1. Horowitz, B. 2010, How Andreessen Horowitz Evaluates CEOs, http://www.businessinsider.com/how-andreessen-horowitz-evaluates-ceos-2010-5-2.
2. Vanson Bourne (2011). The link between strategic alignment and staff productivity: A survey of decision-makers in enterprise organisations. http://www.successfactors.co.uk/resources/resource-item/the-link-between-strategic-alignment-and-staff-productivity/
3. Apple WWDC 2011 Keynote Address. http://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/apple-wwdc-2011-keynote-address/id275834665?i=94705755
4. Schein, E.H. (2004). Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd edn, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco.

John Hagel has written an interesting post on the importance of narratives in providing persistent context for our lives, organisations and society. The post is important because John is an esteemed thinker that business and institutions notice and heed. And it is also this reason that I'm prompted to write this reply because I feel there are some points requiring clarification.

If you're like me you hear the term 'narrative' all over the place these days: "What's the political narrative?" "We need a compelling narrative." "Their narrative is unclear or even non-existent." I'm certain most people have little idea what is really meant by the term. John begins to describe what he means by 'narrative' but, for me, it doesn't go far enough, especially since most of his post is filled with the term.

A narrative must have a narrative structure. That is, it is told as a story. I realize this mixes up John's experiences, story, narrative trajectory a little but please bear with me. For example, John comes close to giving us narrative structure when describing the Christian narrative when he says, "people are born in sin but have an opportunity for redemption through a Savior." This is a statement rather than the narrative but anyone familiar with Christian ways will immediately fill in this statement with the stories that help us make sense of it. The narrative version of this statement is simply  "people are born in sin but THEN have an opportunity for redemption through a Savior." Two events connected. Without the 'then' it's not a narrative. Narratives, like stories, are made from events. Their connections infer causality.

People confuse their description of the narrative with the narratuve itself. And John does this when hs described the Christian narrative as a statement rather than a story. It is a natural tendency to give our narratives and stories shorthand descriptions. They make perfect sense for those people immersed in the narrative. But if you are not living the narrative or unaware of the big story then the descriptions make little sense.

John's American narrative is close to being a one but just falls short when he says, "The growth of the United States critically hinged on a compelling narrative that we have a Manifest Destiny as fugitives from oppression to deliver freedom to the rest of the world ...  As long as oppression exists in the world, this narrative mobilizes us to act and the future awaits to be defined."

The actual narrative requires a narrative structure something like: when America was established, the founding fathers welcomed the oppressed from around the world, they then fought to free themselves from oppression and over time they forged a culture that sort to deliver freedom to the rest of the world.

Now, my American narrative is quite an anaemic example and I'm sure just about anyone could suggest a better rendition. My point is simple, however, narratives require a narrative structure. Story structure provides a narrative with its power.

I understand John wanted to elevate narrative above stories and experience. But in doing so I think he inadvertently misrepresents stories. Firstly stories are not merely about plots and action. Stories are about people, events and something unanticipated (Jerome Bruner). Jay Callahan, the celebrated professional storyteller, puts it another way: stories are about people, events and trouble. You just can't have a story without characters.

For me narratives are broad-brush stories. Narratives are stories without the moments. Of course academics will disagree. I opened The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative to see that "I took the car to work" is a narrative. But I find this definition unhelpful.

John's defintion seems like a definition of life to me:

"Narratives, at least in the way I will be using them, are stories that do not end – they persist indefinitely. They invite, even demand, action by participants and they reach out to embrace as many participants as possible. They are continuously unfolding, being shaped and filled in by the participants."

I agree that narratives invite action and reach out to embrace people. They are unfolding and are being shaped by people. But I disagree that they do not end. The US Cold War narrative is no longer with us and it has been replaced by the War on Terror narrative. As one ends another takes over.

John's list of the benefits of narratives is a good one:

• stability and continuity in our lives. Narratives help to orient us
• narratives motivate action by helping to make sense of the world around us
• narratives also help participants construct meaning, purpose and identity for themselves, and
• narratives help to ignite and nurture passion within us

But they hold equally true for stories. Narratives are a type of story. A big story. An explanatory story.

I totally agree that we need narratives and it's important we understand the narratives that are currently in play and how they shape our understanding and response of what's happening in our organisations and society. I just hope we can move away from talking about narratives as if they are more important than our experience and our stories. The experiences, stories, narrative trajectory bothers me because it feels like the old data, information, knowledge hierarchy which is equally unhelpful.

Narratives emerge from a combination of events and people deciding what aspects of those events they want to retell; what gets amplified. It's much like history really, an emergent process. Regardless of what we do narrative patterns will emerge and only when we are mindful of these narrative patterns will we be able  to choose those patterns to nurture and the ones to disrupt.  Nurturing comes from retelling stories. Disruption happens when new stories are triggered that counter the narrative. If the disruption is big enough (think Egypt) then a new narrative is born.

One of the basic requirements for any form of successful communication is the listener understands what's being said. However we often face the challenge when trying to get our message understood of the "curse of knowledge".

Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has "cursed" us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can't readily re-create our listeners' state of mind.

The term was first coined in 1990 by a Stanford University graduate named Elizabeth Newton. She created a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: 'tapper' or 'listener'. Each tapper was asked to pick a well-known song, such as “Happy Birthday,” and tap out the rhythm on a table. The listener’s job was to simply guess the song.

120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only three of the songs correctly: a success ratio of 2.5%. But before they guessed, Newton asked the tappers to predict the probability that listeners would guess correctly. They predicted 50%. The tappers got their message across one time in 40, but they thought they would get it across one time in two. Why?

When a tapper taps, they are hearing the song in their head. Go ahead and try it for yourself - tap out 'Happy Birthday'. It's impossible to avoid hearing the tune in your head. Meanwhile, the listeners can't hear that tune - all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a kind of strange Morse code.

It's hard to be a tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it's like to lack that knowledge. When they're tapping, they can't imagine what it's like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song.

So, what can you do to overcome the curse of knowledge, especially if you work in very specialised areas full of jargon, technical speak and acronyms? Use specific, concrete examples.

Specific, concrete examples (aka stories) work particularly well in overcoming the curse of knowledge, because they allow us to give examples that people create and can 'see' in their own minds. It takes the abstractions and the jargon and makes them real by allowing the listener to understand what you actually mean.

For example, the other day I was working with a large financial services organisation and they were showing me a clip of their CEO talking about their four focus areas for 2011. In it the CEO said; "We are not easy to do business with" and then moved on to talk about the initiatives underway to rectify this.

As I watched all I could think was; "What do you mean, please give me an example so I can understand". Don't you think a short story showing how difficult they are to do business with would have really helped viewers understand what they meant as well as making the video much more compelling? Imagine how much more compelling it could have been if that story was also about the human impact on customers?

The CEO knew exactly what they meant by the term "We are not easy to do business with" but I suspect across the organisation there were many people who didn't.

In Made to Stick Dan and Chip Heath tell a story about how FedEx used a specific example to bring to life the company’s strategic aim of being "most reliable shipping company in the world." "In New York, a FedEx delivery truck broke down and the replacement van was running late. The driver initially delivered a few packages on foot; but then, despairing of finishing her route on time, she managed to persuade a competitor’s driver to take her to her last few stops." Stories like this are tangible demonstrations of the company’s strategy and help take abstract notions and make them real for people to understand.

So if you want to make sure you are avoiding the curse of knowledge and reducing the gap between you as the 'tappers' and your audience as the 'listeners' use concrete and specific examples. When I say "concrete and specific", I mean focus down on a specific moment and tell a story about that. This would mean instead of saying "delays in our mortgage process" is an example of "difficult to business with", tell a story. Maybe:

Barbara Jones, a customer since she was at school, had shifted out of her house that day. She had packed all of her furniture into a removal truck, and was now parked outside the house she thought she had just brought being told by us there was a delay in processing her mortgage approval. She was now facing the prospect of a two day delay, with no where to stay, a furniture truck full of her everything she owned and her cat in a cage on the back seat. All because of the failings of our mortgage process.

Do these two things feel somewhat different?

Have you ever had this happen to you? I was chatting with a senior leader asking him about their organisational values. "Yeh, sure, we have a set of values. Let me see, where did I put the annual report?" He then ferreted around his office to find the list of values.

There are some things we should have in our head (and in our heart and gut) while others are better just written down. We need these things in our head because, and you've heard this many times before, the world continues to be more complex and unpredictable. So everyday we are faced with new and unpredictable situations where decisions are needed. We wont have time to re-plan. So we will have to rely on the things in our head (our mental models, beliefs, attitudes,values) to do good things for yourself and the company. Here are four things to have in your head:

Values - we know what's really valued in an organisation by the actions people take; especially those people with power. So lists of values such as integrity, transparency, professionalism are worthless if people can't see them lived and when they are transgressed consequences happen. Now you can do nothing and just hope your values support your business, but that's a high-risk strategy. As Gary Hamel once said: "Every organization is "values-driven." The only question is, what values are in the driver's seat?"

Direction - you should really understand your strategic direction otherwise how do you decide what to say "no" to. But don't be fooled into thinking that because you know your strategy the future is crystal clear like a large painted target on the side of a barn. A useful strategic direction is less like a bulls-eye target to be hit and more like a range of desirable destinations to be discovered (on my diagram the destinations lie on the dotted line arc between the two arrows). Strategic stories are useful because they provide context, explain why and show a range of possibilities and avoid the target metaphor.

Identity - Are we local or are we global? Are we a services business or a product business? Are we more like a rolls royce or more like a mini? Knowing the business identity and the identity of your part of the business and how that compliments other identities, helps you connect and complement others inside and beyond the boundaries of the enterprise.

Purpose - I was lucky enough to have the following coincidence. One afternoon I met with the CEO of an insurance company and asked what the purpose of his business. He thought about it for a while and said, "you know what, we are here to sell insurance." Really? Does that get your people out of bed in the morning so they can make a difference? I don't think so. The very next day I happened to have another meeting with a second CEO of an insurance company and I asked the same question. The CEO shot back at me, "we help Australians build a privately funded safety net." Now, that seemed more interesting. It's true that some businesses have an obvious purpose where people really feel they are making a difference to other people's lives. But whatever you enterprise it's important that your purpose inspires your people to make a difference. At Anecdote our purpose is to help bring humanity back to organisations.

I mentioned at the beginning of the post that there are some things that are best written down. Following on from the ideas of David Allen and his Getting Things Done approach, projects and tasks are best written down in a trusted system so you can get these things out of your head and stop them from cluttering your mind.

Last week I was driving to basketball with my daughter listening to Hamish and Andy on the radio. Richard Branson was up next to talk about the launch of Virgin Money and this is what he said (perhaps not word perfect but how I remember it):

Andy: so tell us about this new venture Sir Richard

I can see this little story having an impact for three reasons:

• it's told as a story where the little guy is up against the four big, bad guys (we like a challenge story)
• it reminds us of how Branson introduced Virgin Blue and how flight costs tumbled
• it's a story so can be easily remembered and retold

Have you heard other CEOs launch products or a company with a story/

In our work to help organisations make their strategies stick we often start by helping the executives get clear on their purpose. Why does their enterprise exist? If you have facilitated these types of sessions you probably seen this happen a million times: the group circles in on the essence of what's important and then suddenly they get bogged down nit picking words and trying to incorporate every possibility. In large organisation each executive wants to ensure their part of the business is included in the purpose statement and if you let this happen you end up with mush.

Here's what I do which makes a big difference. Just when they start to get bogged down I call a time out and ask them to watch this video.

From that point on everyone refers back to the Dan's messages and pull each other up when they start acting like a 10th grade school teacher and we move along at pace.

Here is an example of a purpose statement we helped deliver from the Transport Accident Commission: "A future where every journey is a safe one."

It's interesting to note that Dan uses a story to get his message across and clever use of animated graphics.

This evening I was reading Business Model Generation (thanks Tom Graves for sending me a copy). It's an approach for designing your business model and comparing it with others, such as your competitors. It is one of many approaches that illustrates the phenomenal effort that goes into developing business models and strategies. Yet despite all this strategic effort leaders often assume that everyone will just know and understand the strategy and their role in it.

Without strategic clarity, a clear understanding of the strategy that everyone knows, strategy development is a waste of time.

So here's a little test you can apply to your organisation. Don't be too alarmed if you fail many of the questions, many organisation do. But if you do, come and chat to us about strategic stories.

5 questions to test whether your organisation exhibits strategic clarity:

1. Can the executive team simply and clearly describe the strategy without referring to notes (or powerpoint slides) aided only by simple sketches they make themselves?
2. Does the executive team all believe in and describe the same strategy?
3. Do the decisions and actions leaders make confirm the strategy, especially what is said 'no' to?
4. Does everyone in the organisation knows the strategy and understands how their work supports it?
5. Does the organisation's significant others understand the strategy (partners, clients, suppliers) and how they play a part?

I'm off to Malaysia in May to help run a leadership development program for a telecommunication company. While I'm there I'm meeting senior leaders from a range of companies and government departments and showing them our strategic story work. As an ex-IBMer I remember our CEO at the time, Lou Gerstner, say that strategies are the easy bit. But strategy execution is what's difficult. And if you want to get strategy execution right you needed world class processes, strategic clarity and a high performance culture. Our strategic story work helps everyone to really know and understand the strategy (they tell it as a story) providing the much needed strategic clarity.

I have two days set aside to meet people: 18th and 19th May. If you are in KL and would like to meet or you know someone who might be interested in our work, please send me an email (shawn@anecdote.com.au). Looking forward to hearing from you.

Every company wants to tell a compelling story that conveys the essence of what they're about. If it's a success their customers and employees will know where they have come from and where they are going and what makes them unique and worthwhile. And with this knowledge they become attracted to what they are offering. Stories are great for answering the question, 'why?' Why are we investing in this equipment? Why are we hiring these type of people? Why are we spending so much time with our new employees? Why? Why? Why?

I've a treat for you (thanks @vivmcw for the link). A superb example of an company telling a series of stories to explain what makes them tick. But before you feast your eyes on some terrific storytelling keep the following in mind: while it can be important to share your company story to a mass audience with the artistry only a Madison Avenue ad firm can deliver, it's more important your leaders can tell your organisation's story, without notes, to everyone they work with. And from my experience helping executive teams craft and tell their strategic story, the process of working it out is as important as telling the strategic story.

Did you enjoy that? What I really enjoyed was how the narrator (company founder Kihachiro Onitsuka--or perhaps an actor playing him) recounted a series of anecdotes describing key events in the history of ASICS so that we inferred a bunch of things that are not actually said explicitly in the video. For example I felt that ASICS was continually innovating, that they had a long a proud history, they invested in state of the art technology, and they were willing to destroy the past to create the future.

Can your leaders tell your strategic story?

Anecdote helps you harness the natural power of stories to bring your strategy to life. We help you tell your strategic story and then engage your employees in the strategic process so everyone has a hand in creating it. The result is a strategy everyone understands in concrete, specific terms where the level of commitment to its achievement is vastly increased.

We help our clients be more effective and resilient through developing their capabilities to work collaboratively, in teams, in communities of people with shared interest and expertise, and across diverse networks.

Contact Us

NB: For our regular readers you might be wondering why we are explaining what we do in a blog post. We just wanted to make sure people could find our services around making strategies stick and our four speciality areas.

On a recent trip to Canberra I was lining up to board the plane. Behind me was a young family. Their young son, probably four or five, was quizzing his dad.

The boy said: "Why are we in the line?"

"Because we are getting on the plane," his dad replied.

"Why are we getting on the plane?"

"Because we are visiting Grandma in Canberra.," says dad.

"Why are we visiting Grandma?"

"Because we love Grandma and she likes us to visit."

Our urge to know 'why' is deeply embedded in our psyche. From an early age we want to know the reason things happen. It helps us predict what might happen in the future and makes us feel safe.

The desire to know why doesn't diminish with age. If a CEO announces that the company is shifting direction to concentrate on customer service, everyone in the company will want to know why.

And if they haven't been told the story of how the shift came about, they will create their own story.

Imagine two colleagues chatting after the CEO announcement to focus on customer service.

"After all these years banging on about innovation, now it's customer service. What's that about?" says Paul

"Well, I heard the new chairman is a zealot for customer service and at his last position there was a dramatic improvement when they focussed on their customers. He must have twisted the CEO's arm," says David

"Good to know the CEO can think for himself," Paul chuckles rolling his eyes.

If leaders don't tell the story that explains important decisions then employees will use the best information they have to create their own story. At best this only confuses everyone and stalls action. At worse the new direction is actively undermined by the competing stories.

You might be thinking, "so do the senior leaders simply spin a story that's serves their purpose?" You could try but employees are too smart to believe a porky pie. It's in everyone's interest for the leaders to tell what really happen to prompt the change. There are two things someone hearing the story will ask themselves before they will really listen to what's being said: is it relevant? and, is it plausible? Fail these two tests and you may as well be telling the stationery cupboard. With something as important as a new strategic direction it's vital that all the leaders want and can tell this story.

We call this type of story a strategic story and we've been having fun helping some interesting companies find and tell their strategic story.

In my hands is a corporate strategy. It’s a glossy six-page document designed for every employee to memorise and enact. There are seven themes each with three sub-themes. There are also seven values. All the information is presented as dot points well set out with lots of white space for easy reading. Sadly this strategy is unlikely to stick. Perversely, it could even cause the exact opposite behaviour the leaders desire. Here are three reasons for my statement.

1. It’s hard to remember a set of ideas without an organising schema. Neuroscientist John Medina reminds us that we need to get the overall gist of something before we can attend to the details. Watch this video for an example of what he means.

One way to provide the overall context for a strategy is to create a strategic story that places the company’s directions within a schema. That way people get the gist of the strategy and can then attach more and more meaning.

2. Too many things on our mind diminishes our willpower. Implementing a strategy requires willpower and as a recent Wall Street Journal article describes it only takes a moderate cognitive load before we succumb to temptation. In my opening example here are at least 28 things to remember about the corporate strategy which will definitely overload our ability to remember it but more importantly it could be sapping our will to stay the new strategic course.

In applying this idea we would be better off introducing parts of the strategy over time so people can concentrate on one or two changes at a time, perhaps over a 90 day period, before introducing the next part.

3. We remember what we see. In a corollary to the aphorism, 'we remember was we feel,' it is also true that we much more likely to recognise and recall something when we can see it. As John Medina puts it, “The phenomenon is so pervasive, it has been given its own name: the pictorial superiority effect.”

This idea immediately gets us thinking of the splendid pictures we can include with our strategies, those striking images that conjure the essence of what our company is all about. This is the standard approach but there are two other types of images you should consider back-of-the-napkin drawings and the images created by stories.

Dan Roam has created a business from helping people sketch out their thinking, back-of-a-napkin style. In his book with the unsurprising title, The Back of the Napkin, Roam illustrates the power of a simple diagram to share an idea. If you can’t sketch it on a napkin, forget it, it’s too complicated. So ensure everyone can tell your company’s strategic story with the aid of some simple sketches.

Effective stories paint pictures for us as well. When someone recounts a compelling story we visualise what’s happening. And because we are playing out the action in our mind’s eye the story becomes memorable for us. If we tell the story a number of times it becomes embedding in what we know. As the story researcher Roger Schank said, “To tell a story is to remember.”

Some implications of this research.

Don't think you can provide nifty arguments to change people's minds. People will reason things away in whatever way they can and feel good in their answers regardless of how faulty the thinking.

Emotion has a large part to play in our decision making so we need to employ ways of connecting with people that are emotional, such as stories.

In a large change initiative you are just not going to get everyone accepting a new way of thinking or approaching things so it's important to work with those people who can take on the ideas and show the others it can be done.

Westen, D. 2007, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, PublicAffairs, New York.

Westen, D., Kilts, C., Blagov, P., Harenski, K., & Hamann, S. (2006). The neural basis of motivated reasoning: An fMRI study of emotional constraints on political judgment during the U.S. Presidential election of 2004. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 1947–1958.

Today's Australian Financial Review (p7) reports on the release of a study funded by the federal government. The report, titled 'Management Matters in Australia: Just how productive are we?' demonstrates what we know intuitively..that if a company can lift management performance, it will be a key factor in improving company financial performance. The report found Australia is pretty much in the middle of the field compared internationally across a range of management performance indicators. The article includes the statement:

Investing in improved management practices is the single most cost effective way of improving a company's performance.

I am in the middle of running a management development program for one of our clients and the article was bought to my attention at lunchtime by one of the participants. He commented that this article was a good argument for why the company was investing in the program and that he could now clearly see what he can do to achieve the promised performance improvement. It's great to be able to make a difference.

Most organisations I know have a set of stated values. You know what I mean, things like integrity, professionalism, respect for the individual. And in most cases they've been developed for the wrong reasons. And when developed for the right reasons, most employees don't understand what the values mean anyway. Let me explain.

Often the starting question for establishing a set of organisational values is, "Which values should we hold each and everyone accountable for so our organisation thrives?" This gets translated to "What values do our stakeholders (employees, customers, suppliers) expect us to hold?" The list is then drawn up and the result is a moribund list of words.

I was reading a paper by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras and they suggest an alternative set of questions (in my words): "What values do we deeply hold that reflect the essence of our company?" and "Would we still hold these values if they created a disadvantage for us if things changed?" If you can answer these two questions in the positive then you've identified your core values. What I found really interesting was looking at some examples Collins and Porras gave and noticed how each company held a different set in that the usual suspects weren't repeated: they didn't all have to value innovation, or customer service, or integrity. The lists I'm seeing are starting to look the same.

Sony

• Elevation of the Japanese culture and national status
• Being a pioneer - not following others; doing the impossible
• Encouraging individual ability and creativity

Merck

• Corporate social responsibility
• Unequivocal excellence in all aspects of the company
• Science-based innovation
• Honesty and integrity
• Profit, but profit from work that benefits humanity

Walt Disney

• No cynicism
• Nurturing and promulgation of "wholesome American values"
• Creativity, dreams, and imagination
• Fanatical attention to consistency and detail
• Preservation and control of the Disney magic

Collins and Porras' research shows that companies who have enduring values and a clear purpose out perform their competitors. But here's the thing, their core values are not chosen because they think they will be competitive advantages, rather they are chosen because they are held deeply by the core group. Art Kleiner, who wrote a terrific book on core group theory, makes the good point that "The organisation goes wherever its people perceive that the Core Group needs and wants to go. The organisation becomes whatever its people perceive and want to become." And this is double true for organisational values.

Values and meaning

When I worked at SMS (Australian consulting company) in the 90s we had three values: add value, maintain unity, enhance reputation. I knew what the 2nd and 3rd values meant but 'add value' was a bit fuzzy for me. Value fuzziness is a common problem. And you've probably guessed what I'm going to suggest as a way to provide meaning: that's right, STORIES.

Imagine if for every value everyone can tell one or more stories to illustrate what that values means. I often ask people to give me an example to illustrate a value and in many cases all I get is a very intense look of someone desperately trying to remember a story to tell. I've said it before but if a company values [insert value] then it should be teeming with [insert value] stories.

Tyco has worked this one out. Tyco is a global business involved in fire safety, security and manufacturing. A few years back they released a booklet called Doing the Right Thing: The Tyco Guide to Ethical Conduct . For each ethical guideline they included one or more stories that either illustrated what the ethical value means when it's working or what it looks liked when it is broken. For example, Tyco values safety and a healthy work environment and here are their stories of that value when it's broken.

At Anecdote we do a lot of work helping organisations find and tell the stories that illustrate their values and also help design systematic ways to embed those values throughout the consciousness of everyone in the organisation. It is only by working at this level of values and purpose can people make the best decision possible in a complex and dynamic environment. Rules don't cut it. And if we think about what really makes an organisation it's those thousands and thousands of decisions are made each and every day, each one guides by the values in action.

Collins, J.C. & Porras, J.I. 1996, 'Building Your Company's Vision', Harvard Business Review, vol. September-October, pp. 65-77.

Kleiner, A. 2003, Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Privilege, and Success, Currency Doubleday, New York.

Stories are our natural way to plan. We imagine how things are going to work out, who are the players, what incidents might befall us and what we’re going to do to avoid these traps. We remember what happened last time and what we must steer clear of. We think about those good bits we want happening everywhere in our company. We envisage the opportunities and understand the sequence of events we believe are necessary to make it happen. And then, if we are like most executives, we encapsulate our strategy in a set of dot points that immediately strips it of most of its meaning. It becomes a shell of its former self, a strategic skeleton.

What often happens next involves dangling these strategic bones at one or more major gatherings of the company. We launch our strategies and leaders say things like, “This new strategy will guide our actions and decisions for the next period of growth”. But the context is missing. Employees find it hard to understand, and remember. What’s the significance? What does it look like in practice? And as a result they find it difficult to see their place in the strategy. They also find it hard to see the strategy in their own workplace. “What do we actually do?” they say. There’s little to connect their own story to the company’s mission.

It doesn’t need to be like this.

Anecdote’s program keeps the stories in your strategy so that employees understand its meaning and significance while encouraging everyone to actively participate in the strategic process. Our aim is to harness the natural power of stories to bring your strategy to life. The primary objective is to help everyone in the company identify the vital behaviours that must be in place for the strategy to succeed. And then we help create the opportunities to design and implement small changes to bring those behaviours about. And in doing so really making your strategy stick.

I started work this week on a major change project. Our 'three journeys' concept for embedding change and making strategies stick is really resonating. I must admit to walking into the project with some trepidation...a broken organisation that needs to be fixed or 'blown away' (a nice metaphor...not!). After four days there I feel a sense of enormous optimism. There is an alignment of circumstances that provide a great impetus for change. This is the project of a lifetime for the leadership team - the permission to create an amazing transformation.

On Friday afternoon one of the team noted that it was not just a journey we are starting on, its an adventure.

In 1993, as the co-founder of photographic library startup, I travelled to Los Angeles to check out one of America’s largest commercial photographic collections. Remarkably they were well under way converting their film stock to Kodak PhotoCD, a proprietary digital format launched the year before. We were impressed with Eastman Kodak because it looked like they were taking digital photography seriously. The shift to digital was really happening. It was an exciting time. So we began to furiously scan our 100,000 images. At the time it seemed that Kodak was riding the digital wave. They were a digital camera pioneer building the first digital camera in 1975. This 110 year old manufacturing giant, however, missed the digital boat. Their share price today is less that what it was for them in the 1950s. So why did Eastman Kodak falter? Why did it take them so long to really adopt a digital approach to their products and services? What held them back?

Perhaps Kodak reached their goals in the early ‘90s and was struggling to set new ones. Kodak was the predominant force in the photographic industry. It had succeeded through its many advances in chemical processing and manufacturing streamlining. At the same time it was more than aware of the new digital technologies yet profits were coming from its established business lines. In the minds of their leaders they knew how to succeed. They had done it for so long. So don’t fix what’s not broken.

We see this ‘I know what’s right’ mentality in our leadership programs. Just last week Mark was running a leadership program in Sydney and the most senior person in the room approached Mark and said, “I really just wanted to come to see what the troops were learning and keep an eye on things.” He had been with the company for 20 years and believed he’d seen everything and didn’t need to learn anything new. He told himself a story along the following lines: “I’ve been in the business for 20 years now and I have seen it at its best and its worst and I have survived and thrived. So I pretty much know what I’m doing and that it works.”

Our stories, collectively and individually, have a profound affect on what we believe is possible. Therefore the challenge for leaders is to both understand the stories affecting individuals and groups and then know how to define and tell (ideally through wide participation) new stories that set the direction for the company. But that’s not all. The greatest challenge is to help people hear, remember and believe where the company is headed and then inspire people to act in line with that belief.

Whether the leadership team at Kodak had seen the need to redirect towards a digital future in time is hard to say. But even if there was a resolve to go digital, were the leaders equipped with the skills to create the new stories and have them stick in a meaningful way?

Aligning everyone’s actions to the company’s strategy is equivalent of finding the corporate Shangri-la. It can be done. Take IBM’s turnaround for example.

This post is the beginning of a series I have planned that looks at why storytelling is a vital leadership skill. Some of the topics I will cover include how stories are memorable, how they show commitment, how they inspire people to take action, how they reduce anxiety, how they share lessons, how they convey values and how they change minds.

References

Gerstner, L. V. (2002). Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? Inside IBM's Historic Turnaround. New York, Harper Collins.

Turner, T. (2008). Call Me Ted: The Autobiograhy of the Extraordinary Business Leader and Founder of CNN. London, Sphere.

In the second half of 2007, Anecdote worked with the Knowledge for Regional Natural Resource Management (K4RNRM) project in Land & Water Australia (LWA) to develop a methodology for the 56 NRM bodies in Australia to develop knowledge and information strategies. The output is documented in the Regional Knowledge Resource Kit (RKRK), a wiki that is now being used and maintained by practitioners from the regional NRM bodies. Much of the methodology is licensed from Anecdote based on our experience in developing knowledge strategies.

The idea behind the RKRK is that regional NRM bodies can use it to develop their own knowledge strategies. Some initial training is provided to the staff that help facilitate the process in each region, otherwise it is pretty self explanatory.

The RKRK has proven extremely successful, with many of the regional bodies having completed their knowledge strategies. The most recent news is that funding has been provided by the South Australian government for the eight regional bodies in South Australia to develop strategies using the RKRK process.

We think this is a pretty good example of public and private sector collaboration and are proud to have been part of this great initiative. We are in the process of updating the RKRK to ensure it reflects current practice. For any RKRK users from the NRM regions, we would love to get any feedback on RKRK usability and ideas for improvement (mark@anecdote.com.au).

Yesterday I popped out for a meeting at the National Australia Bank. They have a new CEO, Cameron Clyne, and last week he announced a restructure that has substantially flattened the organisation. While the restructure has been the topic of lots of conversations and stories inside and outside the bank, Cameron has done two other things that has got employees talking.

Now these stories might not be 100% factual. But as story guru Robert McKee points out, "What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens." These are the stories some staff are telling about the new CEO and they view his actions as exciting and energising. In their mind a wonderful change is going on.

Then something interesting happened in the meeting. The person I was talking to said it was incredibly difficult to gain direct access to the CEO. That he had a coterie of minders that he brought from New Zealand with him that intercept any approach. And that this is how it should be because he is an incredibly busy man with tremendous responsibilities.

It's interesting that the positive stories created by the meeting room and bubble change seemed to create a positive aura over other activities involving the CEO.

A lesson for leaders is that in addition to be able to find and tell your own stories, it's also important to do things that create positive stories in the organisation. Be remarkable so people remark on your behaviour. But also listen to what stories you create and what people infer from them.

The actKM conference was held in Canberra in mid October. One of the presenters was Jane Chrystal from the Central West Catchment Management Authority who were one of the pilot sites for the Regional Knowledge Resource Kit (RKRK) project. The RKRK project developed a process and supporting resources for the various Natural Resource Management regions to develop their own knowledge strategies.

Jane mentioned that one of the actions from their knowledge strategy has had a big impact. This simple action was for all staff to write a clear description in the subject line of their emails. Adopting this practice has helped staff deal with information overload by being able to quickly identify emails that they need to deal with, and which ones can be simply deleted. I recall when we were working with Jane and her team that another 'small' initiative was to encourage people to travel together as much as possible when driving around the region - the idea being that car trips are an ideal time to have conversations, build relationships and share knowledge.

Congratulations to Nerida Hart and the Knowledge for Regional NRM team from Land & Water Australia on receiving the actKM Platinum Award for their achievements in developing the RKRK and related activities. Anecdote is proud to have had a major role in supporting the RKRK project and we really enjoyed working with Nerida and her team on this project.

I am reviewing Fred Kofman's book 'Conscious Business' subtitled 'How to build value through values. He uses a soccer game to illustrate 'a puzzling paradox' whereby coherent and rational individual behavior often produces incoherent and irrational systemic behavior. Systems theory teaches that to optimize the system, you must optimize its sub-systems. Kofman's soccer analogy kicks this into touch...I have paraphrased it below:

In soccer, the objective of each team is to win by scoring more goals than the opponent. Teams are organized into sub-teams, offense and defense. The objective of the offense is to score goals; the objective of defense is to prevent the opposition from scoring. If the coach decides to use management by objectives and performance-based incentives the resultant compensation system sees the offense receiving payment in direct proportion to the goals they score and the defense in inverse proportion to the goals they allow.

If the incentive system works, the team will end up defeating itself. The offense would rather lose 4 goals to five than win 1 to 0. The defense would rather lose 1 to 0 than win 5 to 4. There is no incentive for the offense to help defend their goal and vice versa. While each sub-team tries to optimize its sub-objective, it sub-optimizes the team's objective. Substitute 'operations' for 'defense' and 'sales' for 'offense'; 'revenues' for 'scoring' and 'costs' for 'preventing goals' and you can see how this would work in organisations, and how easy it is to lose sight of the objective of winning the game as a team.

Kofman's book is an excellent read, using anecdotes and examples throughout to illustrate his ideas. It is a 'must-read' for all managers and leaders.

1. Kofman, F., 'Conscious Business: How to Build Value through Values', Sounds True, Colorado, 2006, p77-78

When we help organisations develop their knowledge strategies we encourage them to focus their efforts on a few areas. We have listed some of the areas that have emerged in past projects and we tend to use this list as a starting point. One of the focus areas is 'Avoid reinventing the wheel' and I was thinking, what one behaviour could you change that would have a major impact in achieving this objective?

Perhaps this is it. Whenever a proposal is put to a leader they ask these questions:

Have we done this before? What happened then? Please demonstrate to me that you have done a good job looking.

Has anyone else done this before? Can we find out?

I can just imagine what might happen the first few times these questions are asked. The proposer returns to their desk and asks if it is at all possible to find out what has happened in the past. Some solutions will be offered but there will be gaps and new approaches will be required. The business lines will then put pressure on the services lines of the business to provide a solution. Improvements will be made and the organisation will incrementally improve their ability to avoid reinventing the wheel.

Deborah May provided the following account in her recent newsletter.

Most leaders want to engage their team in planning processes but don't always do so effectively.

Recently I facilitated a session with a group of executives. The conversation was lively, the questions were thought provoking and we ultimately developed a decent plan for the future. Unfortunately, the CEO's need to control the outcome limited the value of the session and dampened his team's enthusiasm and confidence in the future. The CEO was well intentioned. He asked his team to come up with ideas and told them that he would just listen. This was welcomed. Too frequently he dominated the meetings and limited the contribution of his team. Ideas began to flow, discussion was animated and there was a sense of possibility and excitement in the room. The conversation was still lively when the CEO somewhat petulantly ended the meeting when he said that he'd heard most of it before, they didn't come up with anything new and the meeting had been a waste of time. The animation ceased, the mood changed, energy dissipated and people looked embarrassed. I was bemused, however, and gathered the notes from the meeting, confident that there'd been many good ideas generated that could be harnessed and used. I later found out that the CEO had wanted his team to adopt a particular strategy he'd articulated at a prior meeting. He was so focused on his own idea he had failed to listen to others. When I shared the outcomes of the meeting with him later, he was decent enough to admit he'd been too rash in dismissing the meeting as a waste of time. Unfortunately he was not quite able to articulate his error of judgement to his team. Your role as a leader is to enlist followers and engage the hearts, minds and resources of the whole organisation to achieve something compelling - and then get out of the way. Leaders who are too directive and don't let go, lose not only great ideas but eventually the people as well.

I am sure I have been to that same meeting. The one where the convenor purports to listen but in reality only wants to convince people to do something they have already decided. Professor Brenda Dervin said "anger dissipates when people are listened to". I think the converse is also true. We need to learn from examples such as the one above. If only we could apply the 'law of two feet' from Open Space Technology when we find ourselves in sessions like this.

"Not that old chestnut" I hear you cry.

We have written a whitepaper on this subject and blogged on it a few times. It keeps the KM list serves across the planet pre-occupied for a few months each year.

I recently had coffee with a client to get an update on the implementation of the knowledge strategy we did for them a while back. The client described good progress in many areas but highlighted one of the things holding them back was the continuing confusion/uncertainty about the difference between information management and knowledge management. This was despite an extensive education campaign to get a consistent 'language' in place across the organisation on order to minimise the roadblocks to implementation.

This reinforced to me that we should just stop 'pushing the proverbial up a hill' on this one. My suggestion to the client was to stop talking about knowledge management. It is much easier to grasp concepts like 'better information management' on the one hand, and 'improved collaboration and learning' on the other. This conception makes it much clearer that there is a big 'people' and 'process/practice' component to the task.

Knowledge strategy = Information Management + [Collaboration and Learning]

Andrew Leigh went to the 2020 summit warm up yesterday in Canberra. It was the ACT 2020 summit and the lesson he will be taking to the big event on the 19-20th this month is, "... any idea with less than 90% support on Day 1 is going to get killed." I can just imagine it, 300 people clamouring for their big ideas to be heard by 299 others and only 16 ideas making it to the end of the day. This is idea decimation in the original Roman sense of the word.

How did the successful ideas emerge? Were these successful ideas merely part of the community zeitgeist and would have survived regardless of what the participants did? How many were presented as a list of facts, a presentation of the evidence? I would be willing to bet many of the successful ideas were presented as a story illustrating the idea in a way that helped it stick in the minds of the participants. Once the idea took hold, it grew.

I worry about the upcoming 2020 summit. I want it to be a tremendous success but I can see 10 groups of 100 egos clashing and the largest voices smothering the quieter best and brightest. The success will depend on two factors: how the event is facilitated; and whether participants can tell stories to engage their fellow summiteers.

Facilitation, techniques and physical space

From what I can tell the summit organisers plan to run small group sessions and large plenary presentations. The warning bells should sound if we see rooms arrange in seminar seating styles, the favoured arrangement for one-way information transmission. I'm hopeful that the organisers know about techniques like open space, world cafe, or even something like jump-start storytelling to help the group be more collaborative. But maybe my hope is misplaced. These techniques foster real dialogue when in fact these two days will be a gladiatorial contest of whose ideas win. Physical space and technique are important but both are trumped by the skill and attitude of the facilitators. At one end of the spectrum is the facilitator who already has in their mind a picture of what good looks like and regardless of what's been said this person hears their version and heads the group in that direction. At the other end of the spectrum is the facilitator who is totally focussed on process and helps people be heard. I'm hoping the 2020 team of facilitators fits in this last category.

Storytelling

Each participant will have very little time to engage the group in their idea. Cognitive science show that if someone has a strong opinion on a topic and you provide an alternative opinion, it only serves to reinforce the person's original strong opinion. It's called a cognitive bias.¹ However if we tell a negative story to grab attention then a positive story to illustrate what's possible, we have a much greater chance of changing someone's mind and engaging people.^2,3 It's only after hearing the stories are people open to hearing the reasoning and evidence.

There are three reasons why these stories work:

1. stories are memorable and can be retold. This is powerful if your story embodies your big idea and is the told and retold at the Summit.
2. stories convey emotion and, regardless of what all the hard-headed rationalists would have you think, we make decisions based on the emotions we feel
3. stories provide context and therefore are more meaningful than disembodied facts and figures. Of course some of the best stories are laden with facts and figures.

Summiteers need to find their negative and positive stories this week and resist the urge to start with facts followed by examples and flip their sequence starting with the stories followed by reasoning. The people who can will increase their chances to be heard and understood. And perhaps more importantly telling stories will help relationships form among this elite group and hopefully is followed by collaborations that will make a difference to Australia.

Kevin Rudd understands the value of story. We have seen it in his election campaign and on Sorry Day. And on reading some of the background papers for the Summit I found this warning:

"These background materials aim to tell an evidence-based story about how Australia is faring. They are not intended to be definitive or comprehensive, but were put together to stimulate discussion on the main challenges and opportunities facing the country and the choices to be made in addressing them. They do not representgovernment policy."

The summit organisers understand the power of stories. Now it's time for the participants to embrace this big idea.

Why not join one of our storytelling for leaders workshops.

^1. D. Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007).

^2. S. Denning, The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action Through Narrative (San Francisco: John Wiley & Son, 2007).

^3. H. Gardner, Changing Minds: The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004).

This year I will be speaking at KM Australia in two capacities: running a workshop on knowledge strategy, and speaking with Greg Marsh from BAE Systems about the community of practice work we are doing together.

The conference is held in sunny Melbourne (well, it was sunny yesterday), 21-23 July.

The workshop is called Involving your Organisation in Strategising Knowledge. Here is the description:

Most times we know what to do. We know about the lack of communication across our organisational silos, we know we are constantly reinventing the wheel, we know that it’s hard to find expertise when we need it, and it’s even harder to find relevant information that’s buried in the labyrinth of file system hierarchies. What’s surprising is that we even know how to improve these issues, yet nothing changes. Consequently, we view the development of a knowledge strategy as a change project to help the organisation set a clear direction for change and develop a resolve among employees to take action.

This workshop will teach you how to tap into emotions and demonstrate why you need to broaden involvement when strategising how knowledge will be created, shared and used. This is not about creating a pristine document, but rather marshalling the energy in people to make a difference. You will learn about the Three Journeys process, how to use stories to communicate with impact, and find out what’s really happening in your organisation.

You can request a brochure for KM Australia here. It will be great to see you there.

I’ll remember Strategy and the Fat Smoker (SATFS) by David Maister for two things: helping me realise that creating a resolve in a group to take action is more important than merely creating insights into what should be done; and putting me on to the weight-loss analogy as a way of talking about facilitating change in a business context.

I’ve put both ideas into practice. First, I’ve recognised that our storytelling work is an important way to create resolve in a change initiative, such as developing a knowledge strategy. Second, we have incorporated the weight-loss analogy in our workshops and seminars to help people to think more deeply about what’s required for people to change.

I have to admit, when I received my copy of SATFS I was in two minds about the book. I admire David’s work and I’ve read most of his papers, listened to the podcasts and watched the online videos (is this a little too obsessive?). So when I heard that SATFS was a compilation of articles written from 2005, I thought, “Oh well, I guess it will be nice to have all the articles in one place.”

So I was pleasantly surprised by just how fresh the articles felt and how many good ideas I rediscovered. David creates an appealing flow of topics reinforcing the main theme of getting people to take action. This action-oriented approach makes tremendous sense because, as the business environment becomes even more complex and the issues we try to solve don’t have clear answers (even defining the problems will become more illusive), a good way to proceed is to take action and see what emerges. Then nurture the good and disrupt the bad.

There are two specific writing habits David employs that I really enjoy: first he gives the nitty-gritty details and even provides examples of what you might say in a given situation. For example, when talking about being a trusted advisor and helping clients find a professional service they need when you are not best placed to provide it, David suggests saying something like, “We are not your best choice for that new need. We can do it if you insist, but you may be better served to go to a specialist who can focus on providing the particular client benefit you seek.” And then take the next step to help your client find that needed specialist.

I also like the way David peppers each chapter with questions that prompt us to think differently about strategy. Here are a couple of examples:
“If so many people have offered such practical wisdom, and their work has been so well disseminated, publicized and understood, why do so many managers fail to actually apply all this practical wisdom?”

“The essential questions of strategy are these: ‘Which of our habits are we really prepared to change, permanently and forever? Which lifestyle changes are we really prepared to make? What issues are we really ready to tackle?’”

Because each chapter was originally written as a standalone article, it’s easy to dip into the book at any point. I found myself reading from the beginning to about the middle of the book and then I jumped around following my current interests.

My only suggestion for improvement would be to add end notes so we can follow up references more easily.

David’s passion and field of focus is the professional service firm but this book has a much wider appeal and relevance. Personally, I was able to immediately translate many of the ideas in what we are doing in the field of knowledge management and the application of business narrative techniques. Strategy and the Fat Smoker has the main characteristics that I look for in a book: a good read, new ideas, practical, thought provoking, and most importantly, helping to create new conversations. I thoroughly recommend you to pick up a copy.

A strange recurring pattern involving pigeons seems to have emerged in my life recently.

A pigeon walked into my house the other day after I had left the back door open. It caused a bit of a ruckus when my dog realised what was going on and started chasing it all around the house, bouncing off the furniture and trying to climb the walls to catch it. Relating this incident to a friend a few days later triggered childhood memories of Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines. Anyway, I digress.

Yesterday morning while having coffee with a colleague, we talked about the often inappropriate use of the 'target' metaphor so often used in business, and ended up having an interesting discussion about how pigeons find their way home. I'm no expert on pigeons, so intrigued, I decided to do a little research. Here's what I found:

When reared in a particular loft, a young pigeon can be transported hundreds of miles away and successfully find its way home from the release site. Because it requires the pigeon to pinpoint a specific location, this behavior necessitates more than the compass orientation system of migratory birds. Instead, the pigeon must be able to determine its position relative to the location of the home loft in order to orient itself in the proper direction. In doing so, pigeons use a variety of external cues such as the sun, visual landmarks, olfactory cues, and the earth's magnetic field. Depending on the weather conditions, where the pigeon was raised, and the nature of the release site, pigeons use a combination of these cues to determine their flight path. [1]

After exploring this in more detail, it seems like this might be a useful alternative metaphor for exploring strategy and objective setting, particularly in the complex and rapidly changing environments in which organisations operate today where linear thinking is mostly inappropriate and ineffective.

1. from a copy of articles published by Cornell University: http://albertaclassic.com/suncomp.php

We have long advocated the importance of action over analysis in both our knowledge strategy and community of practice work and I blogged about the 'ready, aim, aim, aim' phenomenon in 2005. Maybe it is because I am conscious of this issue, but in the past few months I have noticed many voices emphasizing the 'do something' theme, starting at the AIM Annual Convention in Sydney in September.

Here are some of the comments/quotes I have heard recently on this theme. I have heard all of them before, they just seem to be more prevalent recently.

• "Ready...Fire...Aim" - attributed to Ross Perot
• "You only find oil if you drill wells" - unknown
• "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzsky
• "Plan a little, implement a lot" - Etienne Wenger
• "Do-think, not think-do" - unknown
• "You cannot think your way to success, you have to 'do' your way to success" - related by Tom Peters at the AIM Convention

Does anyone know of other similar quotes. More interestingly, have others noticed a trend toward action/experimentation over lengthy analysis in recent times?

I'm currently helping a client develop their knowledge strategy. We've decided to include knowledge sharing principles. I believe principles should be clear, unambiguous and emphatic and everyone should know whether they are adhering to the principles or not. More importantly the organisation should decide together what should happen when the principles are transgressed. Are there any biggies I've missed? I probably should keep it to 7 or so.

• We will share what we know with our colleagues.
• We will take time to help our colleagues learn
• We will encourage open and rigorous dialogue, discuss and exploring assumptions, and speak our mind respectfully.
• We shall see if what we are about to embark on has been done before rather than create things from scratch.
• We will borrow ideas shamelessly (with attribution) and not suffer the ‘not invented here’ syndrome.
• We will take time to learn from our successes and failures.
• We will promote cooperation, trust and active participation in project teams, task forces and networks.
• We shall actively look outside our discipline in search of ideas, concepts and approaches that can be adapted and applied to meet our goals.
• We will recognise others for their intellectual effort and willingly share the kudos.

One of the aims of a knowledge strategy is to design a set of activities to enhance an organisation’s knowledge environment. The knowledge environment includes all the factors, both within and outside an organisation, which might affect the creation, sharing and use of knowledge. The list of factors is potentially limitless but experience has shown that many of the important factors can be clumped together under 7 headings.

1. Support - what support does knowledge management have within the organisation? Do the executives believe it's valuable? Are resources set aside for knowledge management? Are roles established to support knowledge management initiatives? Is there a clear link between the business strategy and the knowledge strategy (better still, does the organisation have a knowledge focussed business strategy?)?

2. Technology - what technology is available to support the creation, sharing and use of knowledge? How well is this technology used? What technology should be introduced? Are the practices to use the technology well developed?

3. Organisation and people - How are people organised? What structures exists? What characterises the organisational culture? What types of people are employed? How much churn is there? Is knowledge management a recognised and desirable competency?

4. Routines, rituals and recognition - Are their processes and systems in place that regularly connect people, engage them in conversation and help share what people know? Is it normal to conduct after action reviews, peer assists and lesson learning sessions throughout the life of projects? Does the organisation celebrate good knowledge behaviours?

5. Information - Are information principles well known and followed? Is information well managed, findable, accessible and meaningful?

6. External - What drivers outside the organisation might affect how knowledge will be created, sourced, shared and used?

7. Spaces - How are people and workplaces arranged? Are there physical barriers to knowledge flow? Are their places to collaborate, think, focus and socialise?

Are there other questions you think should be asked?

We've been running a series of knowledge strategy projects for natural resource management regions across Australia. The activities culminate for each region in a two day workshop where participants design a set of projects and interventions to improve their knowledge environment.

To guide people through a process of designing their projects we divide up a sheet of butcher's paper (also called flip-chart paper) into steps for small teams to work on to help them plan their project. I've noticed that the way we divide up this paper and the tools we provide seems to have a big impact. This is not evidence nor proof, just an observation.

Here is an example of one way I've divided up the paper and what the small group of participants wrote.

Now here is another example where I provided a much larger space for brainstorming (a separate page) and suggested they use post-it notes to capture their brainstorming ideas. We also gave them finer tipped felt pens.

Their 'Organise' section spilled over into another sheet of butcher's paper plus there was yet another sheet dedicated to brainstorming. This change toward more detail seems to hold for all the groups in the workshop.

It seems people will fill the space you provide and as a result the second group engaged in a more rigourous and deliberate thinking. Mind you, it could have just been the people in the room.

Technorati Tags: facilitation

The Democratic party in the US has had a pretty rough trot in terms of the number of Democratic Presidents that managed to secure a second term. In recent history Roosevelt and Clinton are it. Professor Drew Westen puts this down to the Democrats being too smart for their own good. They have a tendency to provides the facts, dazzle the electorate with ideas and craft intellectual arguments to garner support. But one thing is missing. Engaging voters' emotions.

Here is a good example from the Bush Snr and Dukaikis campaign from one of the debates.

BERNARD SHAW (MODERATOR): Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?

DUKAKIS: No, I don't, Bernard. And I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don't see any evidence that it's a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime.

And the audience thought, “What a heartless bastard. He didn't even mention how devastated he would be if his wife was raped and murdered.” Instead Dukakis gave the rational, intellectual response and according to Westen lost the debate at this point—in the first minute.

It turns out that 80+% of our decisions on who we vote for are based on our emotions not rational analysis.

You can fall into the same trap with your knowledge strategy. Your strategy report, which should be the result of extensive participation but often isn't, can easily be a rational account of what needs to be done having the emotional content of a wet tea towel.

Stories help. You can illustrate why your organisation needs to take action now and why a systematic approach to managing knowledge is important. You can use stories in at least two ways: including anecdotes throughout the report like this one:

“If we tried to find stuff on landholders beforehand you may have had to have made 15 phone calls, 14 emails, you know, try to track all that info down.”

And you can preface the report with a short history (3 paragraphs) on what brought the organisation to this point. This helps people understand why the strategy is being done and puts the activity in context. And if the story is strong people will recount it when explaining why the knowledge strategy is being done. Now there is some emotional content to what you are saying

Who is prescient enough to be able to consistently predict the future? These researchers think they can.

Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing

via Tom Davenport

In 2002 I wrote a paper called Crafting a Knowledge Strategy. Its basic premise was that a knowledge strategy should be designed for emergence: it should both encourage and cope with unpredictable things happening.

Part of the framework included something I called the knowledge environment, a container of sorts that enabled knowledge to be created, shared, lost and used. Every organisation has a knowledge environment and the role of the knowledge strategy is to work with what's there while incrementally improving it.

So what should you (ideally people within the organisation with some guidance from people like me) examine in a knowledge environment in order to make improvements? Mnemonics helps you remember lists so this is what we came up with.

Space—physical space has a significant impact on how knowledge flows
Technology—what's there to support knowledge work?
Organisation and People—organisational structures, roles, HR processes, rewards and recognition
Routines and Rituals—important business processes, rituals people talk about
Information—can you find the good stuff?
External—external factors affecting knowledge, job markets, industry trends, competitors, clients
Support—is KM supported by the executive? what are the tangible support structures

What have we missed?

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

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.

1. 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
2. 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
3. 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.
4. Then ask participants to look at all the stories again, now they had been extended. Ask them to write a third generation story segment, which they add to the emerging storyline they most liked so far. This process is re-iterated for four generations or longer.

Rick then analyses the results of his experiment and explores different ways people could use the technique.

For me this approach would be ideal to get people talking about the possibilities of a project. It could be then followed by a pre-mortem to provide a reality check.

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One of the most useful books I own is Gary Klein's “Intuition at Work: Why Developing Your Gut Instincts Will Make You Better at What You Do”. Gary takes the mystery out of intuition and explains it as tacit knowledge we develop through experience. What I really like about Gary's books are the practical techniques and so I thought I would share this one with you which is a process for communicating executive intent, or to put it more plainly, how to give directions without telling people how to suck eggs.

In this case Gary Klein is building on some advice Karl Weick's gave on giving directions:

• Here's what I think we face.
• Here's what I think we should do.
• Here's why.
• Here's what we should keep our eye on.
• Now talk to me.

Klein translated this script into the acronym, STICC: situation, task, intent, concerns, calibration.

Situation. (Here what I think we face) Start with providing the context for the task. What has happened that lead to this need? Grab their attention in the telling. Use all the ideas described by the brothers Heath best seller, Made to Stick. It's important that the person taking on the task understand its importance and how it fits in to the bigger picture.

Task. (Here's what I think we should do) Keep it short and to the point. You can elaborate later. When describing the task avoid describing how it should be done and keep focussed on what needs to be done. People hate to be told how to do their jobs.

Intent. (Here's why) Here is where you describe the purpose of the task. Why the task/project need to be done. If you have a picture of what the end point looks like this is the time to share that vision. In a complex and unpredictable environment the best you might be able to do it describe some of the characteristics of a successful completion.

Concerns (Here's what we should keep our eye on) Chances are you have had experiences in these types of projects and you know the sort of thing someone should keep an eye on. If you don't you might want to get someone in the meeting who does have that experience. Running a mini pre-mortem could be useful.

Calibration (Now talk to me) This is the essential step. Now make yourself available for questions and follow up discussions. As soon as someone on a task new questions will emerge and patterns will arise. This might lead to tremendous insights and accelerated accomplishment or lighting fast pursuit of a white rabbit down a long and dark hole. Being open to get together during the task helps you act as an effective guide while enabling the person doing the task to keep on track to deliver a quality result.

Technorati Tags: karl weick, gary klein

I just returned from a week's holiday at Mossy Point in NSW and as usual I had a pile of books I was going to read and somehow managed to read a completely different set. This usually happens because my host often has a more compelling choice of reading or there's a good second hand book store nearby (in this case Mogo has a fine example). I started with the following:

• “The Myths We Live By” (Mary Midgley)
• “Orality and Literacy (New Accents)” (Walter J. Ong)
• “A Cultural History of Causality: Science, Murder Novels, and Systems of Thought” (Stephen Kern)

And ended up reading,

• “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't” (Jim Collins)
• “Catch-22” (Joseph Heller)
• “The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell” (Bertrand Russell)

Good to Great captured my imagination. While I'm always a little sceptical of the approach, “let's compare some companies that have done well and learn their secrets and let's learn how we can apply those secrets to your company and also do well”, there were many unknowns and questions posed by Collins and his team of researchers. One of the points in the book was the supremacy of planning over the plan. While not a new idea in itself it came on the heels of another simple and fairly well known idea: what you measure will affect behaviour so think carefully about what you should measure (Collins was referring to the need to understand your economic driver).

This got me thinking. Why do so many organisations develop their knowledge strategies with a burst of energy over a short period of time? This puzzles me because we know that planning is more important than the plan. Understanding emerges over time through conversations. You can't have a couple of workshops and run some interviews to develop a good grasp of what needs to be done, where the focus should be. Organisations require a process that engages people at different levels in conversations that matter about how knowledge can be best used.

So while chatting to Mark this afternoon I suggested the short, sharp approach (which will definitely create a strategy but can't be the best way to strategize) might be partly due to how large consulting firms need to work in order to stay profitable. The large firms work on a profit per consultant basis. Within the firm this is called utilisation. The best way for a consultant to maintain high utilisation is to be billable five days a week. A project that's divided and spread over a couple of months with a couple of days here and there is unsustainable for large firm. So over the years after an organisation receives proposal after proposal from the large firms the organisation begin to tacitly learn that strategies should be created intensely over short periods of time.

And guess what happens when you get together highly paid, smart professionals to deliver a strategy to a tight deadline? Most of the time it results in a hefty document detailing many factors and features to consider but often merely succeeds in bamboozling. Last week I was talking to a senior manager in a government agency and she said they'd just received their knowledge strategy and they feel it's too complex and they're not quite sure what to do. Imagine, on the other hand, a group of people within the organisation working together on their knowledge strategy and all agreeing that the essence of their strategy is captured in a simple sentence. Because they all have been part of the process this sentence means so much that action can be taken to make it a reality. Sure, you need the implementation plan and more importantly a process so actions that move the organisation toward their objectives bubble up from everyone.

One fact that stood out for me in Good to Great was that on average it took a 'great' company four years to define their essential strategy (their hedgehog concept). And the strategy evolved through vigourous debate, discussion and listening. It's this type of process I'm advocating, and now large organisations are turning to specialists in small companies, they can served without the constraints of the large firm's economic model.

I think our Three Journey Approach to knowledge strategy is a new way to orchestrate these essential conversations.

• The first journey is with the leadership team and the aim is to create a broad direction for everyone. Rather than having a single workshop and interviews we would facilitate four conversations (or more) around the nature of their business and the role knowledge plays. The result is a small set of objectives for the knowledge strategy.
• The second journey is where the rest of the staff get involved. Their job is to help work out how the objectives might be achieved in reality. We know, however, that asking people what they know is a futile exercise because we all need context to remember what we know. So we use anecdote circles and collect stories as a way to find out what's happening and what could be done.
• The third journey is a simple improvement process whereby the knowledge strategy continues to adapt to the changing circumstances.

Technorati Tags: knowledge strategy

Nicholas Carr has written a thought provoking piece in Strategy+Business on the limitations of open source approaches. In a nutshell, open source approaches work best when people are refining something that's already been created and where the problem can be divided into chunks so lots of people can work on it at the same time (e.g. fixing bugs in Linux). Creating the idea in the first place is best done by an individual or small group.

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For a few months now I have been proposing a new way to do knowledge strategy that involves everyone in the organisation. There are three journeys involved and in the last journey you help establish a process (described here and illustrated above) that encourages lots of people to make incremental improvements towards a set of common objectives. We have mentioned here that organisations have similar objectives so you don't need to create these from scratch.

This post is here to pull these threads together.

I found a new blog this morning and while it's a newie I'm hoping it will have some more good posts like this one about Walter Ong and the issue of redundancy in storytelling. The blog authors are Jim Stahl and Nemola Kalo.

I found this quote Jim posted from Walter Ong very interesting:

“Since redundancy characterizes oral thought and speech, it is in a profound sense more natural to thought and speech than is sparse linearity. Sparse linear or analytic thought and speech are artificial creations, structured by the technology of writing.... With writing, the mind is forced into a slowed-down pattern that affords it the opportunity to interfere with and recognize its more normal, redundant processes.”

A while back I wrote a piece about the difference between storytelling and story writing and while I didn't recognize the issue of redundancy there I was quite aware of the reduced speed and second guessing that was introduced when a story is written.

Perhaps more importantly, redundancy is an important feature in a complex environment where contexts are continuously changing. Mark and I are in the middle of a knowledge strategy assignment and we are conducting some interviews to help the organisation choose the knowledge objectives they would like to focus on for the next 12 months. During those interviews I have been telling the same story about how we propose the conduct the 3rd journey (the continuous improvement process). On the forth telling of the story I get this confused look on Mark's face. It turns out that up until that point I was not conveying what I meant so this disconnect triggered a good conversation and we got our story straight. There was something different in the forth context and telling that triggered something for Mark. Redundancy is important.

Technorati Tags: knowledge strategy

We have noticed that knowledge strategies tend to have a recurring set of objectives. We listed an initial set of core objectives here and have developed a longer set over a series of conversations over the past few days. The list is shown below. Unfortunately a strategy cannot tackle everything without losing focus - the 'boiling the ocean' effect.

During the 1st journey of knowledge strategy development we encourage the leadership team to identify a 3 or 4 of the areas on the list below to focus on as part of the project. These then guide the 2nd journey and the first 12 months of the 3rd journey. The three journeys are described here.

Our list of generic knowledge strategy objectives includes:

1. Attract and retain the best people
2. Minimise the impact of people leaving – or better retain our knowledge
3. Build better relationships
4. Enhance collaboration
5. Build skills and know-how
6. Improve innovation
7. Improve how we learn from mistakes and successes
8. Improve ability to find relevant expertise
9. Better deal with complex situations
10. Improve ability to search for and find information
11. Avoiding reinventing the wheel
12. Finding and applying good practice
13. Encouraging people to call for help

Strategies should result in a set of actions making the organisation more valuable to whoever it serves. I learned this from David Maister Knowledge strategies are no different. The objectives of the knowledge strategy activity are fourfold:

• develop a common understanding among leaders and staff of where and how they should enhance their capability to create, share and use knowledge
• understand where to focus efforts and when to say 'no' to suggested activities
• inspire people to take action and work differently
• work out the actions needed to make a difference and get acting

We've learned that top down strategies don't work. For one thing they typically rely on extrinsic motivations (rewards—do this and you'll get that) which I'm learning from Alfie Kohn is an intrinsic motivator killer (I've got to share some of the experiments Alfie talks about in a future post). So our approach to knowledge strategy is to first view the activity more as a verb than a noun. That is, it is better to strategize that the develop a strategy. The get things moving in an organisation we've developed what we call the three journeys approach.

The first journey is designed to help the organisation's leaders develop a common understanding of what they would like to achieve and defining this end-state in broad terms, while knowing that detailed plans are unlikely to be achieved (the world is too unpredictable for a simple, linear view). We encourage the leadership group to develop a rough mud map of the journey from the current situation to this desired end state while resisting the urge to fill in the details. The staff fill in the details as part of the second journey.

The second journey involves the rest of the organisation (or a representative subset) planning how they will get to the desired state. This involves understanding the current knowledge environment—who's connected to whom, where are the important knowledge assets, where are the blockers, what are the enablers—and developing the best possible map based on current information and resources available that can be made to guide the third journey.

The third journey is when the organisation actually embarks on implementing the ideas developed in the first two imaginary journeys. Most importantly in the third journey, the organisation implements an iterative process they designed in the second journey that embeds new knowledge-related behaviours and provides opportunities for new ideas to be injected in how things are done. For an example of what this might look like please refer to our recent blog post on the topic (http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2007/02/redressing_the.html).

I have just returned from the UK and from co-delivering a training program for new CoP coordinators in a global company. It was a great experience and I learned much about communities of practice. In the week before, I spent some time in Brisbane looking at some of the company’s CoP success stories. A number stood out, including this one:

In early 2005 a CoP was established around the data and process standards used to manage physical assets across a multi-site division. The company knew that a new module of SAP will be introduced in late 2008 and that achieving agreement on data and process standards was a key to successful implementation. In early 2007, the CoP members took on the challenge of establishing the standard and, using a wiki, they did it inside 6 weeks.

Aside from the importance of this achievement, what stood out for me was management’s insight in establishing the community long before it was needed to tackle this key business issue. Using hindsight its obvious that the group needed to work on their social capital before they could be ‘tasked’. Building a capability in this manner is a great example of thinking strategically about communities of practice.

A simple way to help people develop stories of how their organisation might operate in the future is to ask them to consider specific triggering events then explain what happened. It’s important the triggering event is specific yet representative.

For example, a triggering event might be Ron Wilson suddenly resigning from the investments section to join a competitor. The group might decide to tell the story of what happened from the point of resignation or sometime before that.

Another approach is to find examples of how you would like your organisation to operate from within your organisation or in other similar organisations. As William Gibson says, “The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.”

So why are we interested in future stories? They help an organisation paint a memorable vision of what they would like to achieve and rooting it in specific examples that everyone can understand, recollect and retell. The provide a strategic intent for the organisation without being prescriptive.

Strategies should result in a set of actions making the organisation more valuable to whoever it serves. Knowledge strategies are no different but most organisations develop a knowledge strategy in the following way:

1. the company engages consultants to analyse their needs
2. the leaders are asked, "what result would you like to see at the end of the project?" The consultants capture this information as the project's vision.
3. the consultants interview staff, conduct focus groups and compile an inventory of important knowledge assets
4. gaps are identified between what currently occurs and what needs to happen to achieve the vision
5. a report is written and there's considerable debate over the structure, format and wording of this document
6. the knowledge strategy and associated implementation plan is presented to the executive group for their approval
7. everyone is exhausted but pleased with the document
8. there is little energy left for the actions needed to make the required changes

Don't get me wrong, a process like this is what’s mostly needed to undertake an effective knowledge strategy. It suffers, however, from a problem of balance. The weight of effort is on developing the document—the strategy or plan. Little energy or process is left for people to take actions that will change how things are actually done. The further the organisation gets away from the initial strategy development exercise, the greater the apathy to implement the original plan. The ideal situation is one where the top down focus on defining what to do is balanced with a process that enables people to do things that will make the organisation more valuable to whoever it serves.

So what if we put less effort into the knowledge strategy design and more into implementing strategic actions?

There are three reasons why we should shift the balance from viewing the strategy as a thing to redressing the balance towards the process for implementing the strategy.

1. businesses are less predictable and long-term, linear plans rarely achieve their stated goals
2. embedding actions in the day-to-day activities of the organisation allows new ways to tackle problems to emerge
3. the process moves the responsibility for making a difference to how knowledge is created, shared and used to everyone in the organisation rather than a typically under-resourced knowledge management unit

So how might this look? The best solution is one developed by people in the organisation, one that develops the process for embedding the strategic actions into the day-to-day activities. To give you an idea of what it might look like here are some ideas adapted from David Maister's suggested approach for conducting a strategy.

The initial knowledge strategy design should result in some objectives, which might include things like:

• improve knowledge sharing
• enhance innovation
• reduce impact of people leaving (knowledge retention)
• build skills and know-how
• improve everyone's ability to find relevant knowledge when they need it
• improve how we learn from experience

Ideally, there should only be two or three objectives. Six is too many.
The process starts by giving each group within the organisation one sheet of paper for each objective. Each sheet has four columns. The group lists, for each objective, the actions they are going to take over the next three months to help achieve the objectives. A senior member of staff works with the group acting as a friendly sceptic or mentor. This mentor's role is to ask question, helping the group to stretch their plans or to reign in over enthusiasm. At the end of the session, the mentor sets a date to meet with the group again in three months where they will review how they went, what they learned and establish a new set of actions for the following three months.

The four columns to fill in for each objective are:

• the action to be done
• who is responsible for ensuring the action is completed
• the date the action will be completed
• a description of how the group will know the action has been completed

It’s important that the group focuses on actions and not goals. For example, if the objective is “improve knowledge sharing” then rather than provide a goal such as, “build better relationships with the policy division,” describe a tangible action like “organise 3 brown bag seminars with the policy division.”

By repeating this activity every three months the organisation begins to embed knowledge-related activities into their day to day business. It becomes second nature. The three-month time frame also feels achievable and tangible. It gives the groups something in the foreseeable future to aim for. One last benefit of a shorter time frame for action is that it enables the organisation to sense and respond to the changing business environment making it more nimble and resilient.

You might be thinking, “Yeh, but what about those initiatives that take longer than three months to accomplish?” Of course this will be the case. Sometimes the organisation will be able to identify longer-term initiatives, such as the adoption of communities of practice or an intranet implementation, in the initial knowledge strategy design which can be implemented organisation-wide. Here I am arguing for a balance between the more traditional approach to developing a knowledge strategy with a greater emphasis on embedding the knowledge actions.

Maister, D. H. “Ready, Set, Go: Fast-track Strategy.” Strategy in Professional Business  Retrieved 27 February, 2007, from http://davidmaister.com/podcasts/4/45/.

There seems to be a renewed interest in developing knowledge strategies. We have been involved in three in the last six months and our narrative techniques have been well received. We now need to move people from seeing a knowledge strategy as a thing to a seeing it as a process. We also need to see a shift from developing knowledge strategies to engaging people in knowledge-focussed business strategies.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that every knowledge strategy has the same objectives, which are:

• improve knowledge sharing
• enhance innovation
• reduce impact of people leaving (knowledge retention)
• build skills and know-how
• improve everyone’s ability to find relevant knowledge when they need it
• improve how we learn from experience

If this is the case, couldn’t a knowledge strategy activity move quickly to engaging as many people as possible in the organisation to work out what actions are needed to make progress on the objectives?

Have a look at this funny take on the recent election slogan adopted by the NSW Labor Party: “More to do, but we're heading in the right direction”

(hat tip to Victor Perton)

Over the last few months we’ve talked about the importance of having a short phrase or mantra to help everyone in an organisation implement the company’s strategy (here and here). At Anecdote we’ve had a few catch phrases over our relatively short life and we’ve never been totally happy with any of them. Here’s the chronology:

• complexity – narrative – knowledge
• narrative – narrative – narrative
• insight and empowerment
• learning and change

After reading Made to Stick we realised the problem. Each attempt was abstract and passive and the phrases didn’t really give us any indication about how to act nor tell our clients what we were all about. So here is our new tag line: Putting stories to work

Let us know what you think. 

A while ago I argued that the target metaphor was inappropriate for change projects. The idea that anyone could accurately define a change target, aim at it, and then hit it with a well shot arrow was, at best, an illusion. In most cases the possible, beneficial end states are wide and varied.

So the question is, how do you define an intent that provides direction, inspires action yet is not overly prescriptive? John F. Kennedy provides a good example.

In his now famous ‘man on the moon’ speech, Kennedy kicked off the US entry to the space race with the following goal:

First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.

This statement of intent is concrete (landing a man on the moon), active (landing, returning, achieving), simple, time bound (before this decade is out), and is in the form of a mini story (land the man and get him home safely).

The military are well versed in providing strategic intents for missions because they know that No plan survives contact with the enemy. Chip and Dan Health explain the military’s use of commanders intent (CI).

CI is a crisp, plain-talk statement that appears at the top, of every order, specifying the plan’s goal, the desired end-state of an operation. At high levels of the Army the CI may be relatively abstract: “Break the will of the enemy in the Southwest region.”

Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad suggest three key aspects of an effective strategic intent:

1. Sense of Direction. "Strategic intent (...) implies a particular point of view about the long-term market or competitive position that a firm hopes to build over the coming decade or so". It should be a view of the future – conveying a unifying and personalising sense of direction.
2. Sense of Discovery. A strategic intent is differentiated; it implies a competitively unique point of view about the future. It holds out to employees the promise of exploring new competitive territory.
3. Sense of Destiny. Strategic intent has an emotional edge to it; it is a goal that employees perceive as inherently worthwhile.

These examples provide a sense of what a change management team needs to achieve, but we still need a way to develop a useful intent. As you might guess, my suggestion is largely participative, using stories and question-based. But I have run out of time to finish this post so I will write another making some suggestions on how you can create your strategic intent for a change management program. In the meantime any other examples or descriptions of how you do it would be appreciated.

Bruce Nussbaum over at BusinessWeek Online has written a short piece entitled: Lessons From Home Depot’s Bob Nardelli—Why Command And Control Is So Bad.

Autocratic top-down, command and control works great when you focus on process—cost and quality. Six Sigma measures all that stuff wonderfully.

The truth is that in the new global business culture, process controls and metrics are critical to any big company but they are now sediment, one of the things that is commoditized and laid down on the corporate structure to make way for the discipline and process of innovation.

 

It’s good to see commentators starting to reflect the need for leaders and managers to look beyond what can be easily measured and controlled. Sadly, most commentators, leaders or managers are still attempting to use the tools developed for command and control (such as six sigma and balanced scorecard) to address complex issues such as culture, customer service, sales, leadership and innovation. Warning, here comes some flagrant self promotion. You might think that it’s only fringe organisations that might use techniques like business narrative, most significant change, and complexity-based thinking. Not so. Here are some of the clients we have done projects for and many are global businesses.

• BHP Billiton
• Rio Tinto
• ANZ Bank
• National Australia Bank
• Australian Army
• AstraZeneca
• IBM
• The Treasury
• CSIRO
• DSTO

[via Bob Sutton]

I was working with Tony High before Christmas when he made the point to the group that ‘people don’t leave organisations, they leave managers’.  This is certainly consistent with my experience. Even if your job is fantastic, if your manager isn’t then thoughts inevitably turn to ‘what next’ and it’s a slippery slope once you start thinking about leaving an organisation. Conversely, I have endured lousy jobs because of a fantastic manager.

One of the areas that managers have a big effect is upon creativity and innovation. Teresa Amabile, in an article titled ‘The Power of Ordinary Practices’ in HBR’s Working Knowledge points out that if people are in a good mood on a given day, they're more likely to have creative ideas that day, as well as the next day. Below is an extract from the article:

All this reinforces the importance of Bob Sutton’s ‘no asshole rule’. 

Christmas reading has help me stumble across two very different essays with the same theme: people are enormously influenced by their social ties. Anyone reading this blog won’t be surprised by that theme but these essays present two very different contexts. The first is called Knowing the Enemy by George Packer, which was recently published in the New Yorker. It’s a lengthy treatment on how social scientists are re-conceiving the way the US government might approach insurgencies. The “War on Terror” moniker has mislead policy makers and commanders in thinking primarily from an armaments and military force perspective. The essay suggests that in order to combat insurgencies we need information, influence and the ability to connect people in different ways.

The other essay is called Darwin on the Bounty: The How and the Why of the Greatest Mutiny in History by Michael Shermer. It’s a chapter in his book, Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown. He argues that Christian Fletcher did not lead the mutiny merely to rebel against the poor treatment meted out by Captain Bligh. Rather, he was keen to return to Tahiti and the life and family he established there. Shermer’s underlying theme is an evolutionary one emphasising the deep motivation of people wishing to maintain their close social ties. In the prehistoric past hanging with the ones you love was an excellent strategy for perpetuating one’s gene pool—they tended to be your relatives. More recently these small family groups have become more complex and now include other affinities yet the evolutionary habit remains and stays with us as a strong motivating force.

What does this mean for organisations? Well I think one of the social scientists from Knowing the Enemy, Australian Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, said it best in his tips for company commanders (read, managers) about to be deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan:

Know your turf—Know the people, the topography, economy, history, religion and culture. Know every village, road, field, population group, tribal leader, and ancient grievance. Your task is to become the world expert on your district.

[thanks to Les Posen for the link to Knowing the Enemy]

We’ve been helping a few organisations with knowledge strategies lately and discovered the power of knowledge strategy tag lines. This idea first came to us while we were working on trust in one of the large Australian banks. They’d done a traditional mission, vision, values exercise (which are normally ineffective) but one of the values kept popping up in the meetings: “tell it like it is, no spin.” Whenever someone was pussy-footing around a topic someone would invariably blurt out this line and more often than not the pussy-footer would become forthright. We never heard the other values mentioned and when asked, people only seemed to remember this one. Colloquial language seem to be an important part of its effectiveness.

The relationship to knowledge strategies was drawn for me by Mark Bennett over at Rio Tinto. Mark was saying that he liked the tag line “Making collaboration ridiculously easy” and on hearing this I knew it had the same appeal as “tell like it is, no spin.” Whenever someone is faced with a difficult collaboration situation I can imagine people saying, “Come on, we need to make collaboration ridiculously easy not the bloody mess it is now!” (this is how an Aussie would say it and a little profanity ups the intensity).

Here are a couple of other knowledge-related tag lines I’ve heard which can be used but lack the punch of the previous examples:

• connect people to people, people to communities, people to information, and people to good practices (APQC?)
• find it and use it, find it and adapt it, build it yourself (Learning to Fly?)
• hire smart people and let them talk (Larry Prusak)
• notice, understand and act (based on Karl Weick)

Are you aware of other good knowledge strategy tag lines or would like to share your own creations? Love to hear them.

 

Here is an interesting article which reports on a range of neuroscience research on how people respond to change. The article explores the following conclusions:

• Change is pain. Organizational change is unexpectedly difficult because it provokes sensations of physiological discomfort.
• Behaviorism doesn’t work. Change efforts based on incentive and threat (the carrot and the stick) rarely succeed in the long run.
• Humanism is overrated. In practice, the conventional empathic approach of connection and persuasion doesn’t sufficiently engage people.
• Focus is power. The act of paying attention creates chemical and physical changes in the brain.
• Expectation shapes reality. People’s preconceptions have a significant impact on what they perceive.
• Attention density shapes identity. Repeated, purposeful, and focused attention can lead to long-lasting personal evolution.

I was flattered to read that David Maister recently quoted me in a recent article on strategy based on a comment I’d made on his blog. I was making a point about how the stories staff hear about senior management will only change if senior management acts in new ways worth retelling. These new stories then change the perceived needs and desires of senior management (see Art Kleiner’s idea on core group dynamics) which in turn affects the decisions made at the coal face. A modified culture emerges. Unfortunately its impossible to predict what exactly will unfold. Consequently its vital that leaders know which stories are being retold (use anecdote circles) and why people think they are significant (most significant change). It’s only by detecting the weak signals and adapting continuously can a productive work environment be maintained in the face of change.