Caution, ideas inside!

Happy Thursday Joe,

And happy new year from all of the Anecdote team!

In this our first edition of the Anecdote newsletter in 2008, you may notice that we've made a few changes. Some of these are simple cosmetic changes, which we will continue to refine and further develop in coming editions. We're also making some changes to the content. For example, we've added a new section for reflecting on our learning and experiences from client engagements.

We're always striving to provide informative, relevant, and interesting material. We'd really like to hear from you about what you'd like to see in the Anecdote newsletter this year. Please contact us with your comments, suggestion and ideas.

In this edition, we have:

• Book Review — Group genius: the creative power of collaboration
• Technique — Conference call practices
• What's happening — Consulting engagements and events that we're attending
• Learning from engagements — Leadership & Management Development
• Blog posts you might have missed — Three types of collaboration

We hope that you enjoy reading. Feel free to pass this email on to your colleagues and friends if you think that they would enjoy it too.

Group genius: the creative power of collaboration

— by Keith Sawyer (Author)

Keith Sawyer contends that most of what we know about famous inventions is misguided because it's based on a myth - that of the lone genius. In this book he reveals the real stories behind many of the great inventions that we think we know:

"... the telegraph (not invented by Samuel Morse), the light bulb (not invented by Thomas Edison), and the airplane (not invented by the Wright brothers). Forget the myths about historical inventors; the truth is always a story of group genius."

Sawyer shows how, in the ever more complex organisation made up of inter-connected and interacting teams, the creative innovations of today are emerging. He believes that group genius - the power of collaboration - is what uncovers creative solutions to pressing problems. Collaboration leads to innovation.

Sawyer is an American psychologist and business consultant whose previously published work focuses on creativity. In the early 1990s he went to watch an improv group called Jazz Freddy in Chicago. The performance each night was a fully improvised one hour play in two acts with an interval. The audience provided an event and the location for the story.

Sawyer wanted to know how ten people could march out on stage and create such complex performances when none of them had any idea at the beginning of the night as to what was going to happen. Pretty much what goes through my mind when I watch Thank God You're Here on Channel 10. Using interaction analysis he learnt that no matter whether it is an improv group or a work group similar things happen - the group members spark off one another, each person's contributions are the match that lights the creativity fires of the others.

This led him to identify seven key characteristics:

1. Innovation emerges over time
2. Successful collaborative teams practice deep listening
3. Team members build on their collaborators ideas
4. Only afterwards does the meaning of each idea become clear
5. Surprising questions emerge
6. Innovation is inefficient
7. Innovation emerges from the bottom up

Now in my case, Sawyer is effectively preaching to the converted. Just the same I found that the book had plenty of value as it clarified my thinking on collaboration and teams. And much of it talked about things that we at Anecdote try to build into our project work. Teams need to be flexible thinkers and responsive to continuously making small changes to the status quo in order to move projects forward. And you cannot mandate collaboration - spontaneous cooperation arises out of environments designed to encourage it.

The thing that appealed most to me in reading this book was the interesting connections and perspectives that Saywer brings to the ideas of group creativity, cooperation and collaboration and the way they contribute to innovation.

Reviewed by: Robyn Ciuro

Conference call practices

Shawn recently collaborated with John D. Smith, Principal Consultant of Learning Alliances to write a practice note on Conference call practices. Here's a brief excerpt:

Teleconferences are a fact of life in business and in the life of many communities. And many of us have instant messaging tools like AIM, MSN, or Skype installed on our computers. Yet few people are aware of the utility of combining the audio channel of a teleconference with the text of an online chats in a way that enhances the learning experience for everyone involved. The technology, along with attention to the collaborative spirit can make this form a powerful knowledge-generating process. A community of practice framework helps us bring out the value of this simple practice, whether it's used by a large group or just two people at a time. This note describes how to take notes collaboratively while having a conversation on the phone. This collaborative note-taking approach is useful for several reasons:

• Phone calls support synchronous "thinking together," negotiation of meaning and turn-taking in familiar ways
• Synchronous note-taking allows people to share what they heard said or what they want to add (e.g., URLs) without the turn-taking constraints of a phone call
• As an artifact, a chat transcript is an informal record of what was said that's portable, easy to scan, a reliable memory jogger, and is a helpful first draft for more polished writing.
• An audio recording can be evocative of the original conversation if it's portable and documented so that prospective listeners know what the recording contains.
• There are advantages of having an integrated chat and audio recording, but it's most economical to have them separate.

You can read the full practice note here.

Consulting Engagements and Projects:

• Establishing and fostering a number of communities of practice for a number of clients in industry and government
• Delivery of an ongoing leadership program for a multinational pharmaceuticals company
• Storytelling Booklet for a company in the cement industry
• Customising a leadership and management development program for a global technology and services enterprise
• Information architecture project for a large engineering company

Upcoming Events that we're running or attending:

February

• 26th - Storytelling for Business Leaders course in Canberra
• 27th - Narrative Techniques for Business course in Melbourne

March

• 11th - Narrative Techniques for Business course in Perth
• 27th - Narrative Techniques for Business course in Brisbane

Leadership & Management Development

One of the things we spent a lot of time on in 2007 was developing and delivering leadership/management development programs. This theme has continued with 2008 and we are currently customising the program for a new client. The regular interaction with all levels of managers exposes us to some great learning opportunities and powerful examples of how to get things done, and of course, how not to. One of the learnings is the importance of day-to-day interactions between managers and their staff and how every interaction is an opportunity to engage or to demotivate someone. Often, seemingly insignificant things can have a major impact. I particularly remember responses from two crusty middle managers when asked to describe management behaviours that have had a big impact on them:

One guy explained how his first job was as a labourer at a caravan park on the south coast of NSW. On his first day he spent most of the day digging out a trench to expose a broken sewerage pipe. Late in the day, a 'poncy bloke in a suit' drove into the caravan park in a shiny black Mercedes. The driver got out of the car and asked him who he was and what he was doing. When he explained the driver quickly stripped off his suit and put on a daggy singlet and pair of blue shorts and jumped into the trench and started helping to dig. "Too bloody hot for you to be doing this on your own" he said. Turns out he was the manager of the caravan park who had been to Sydney for a meeting that day. The guy telling the story said he would never forget the impact of this guy pitching in and getting dirty. A possible moral, for those that like those sort of things, is 'never ask anyone to do something you are not prepared to do yourself'.

The second story was from a very tough South African guy who had worked in many countries over the years. In one of his early jobs in South Africa he was working in a warehouse. On the day before Christmas, the three manangers of the warehouse were sitting in one of the offices with the door closed. The staff figured they would be getting an early knock off for Christmas and that the managers were getting ready to give them all a welcome surprise by closing at lunch time. Just before lunch the three managers got up and left without saying a word and did not return until after New Year. Not so much as a "Merry Christmas" for the staff. Everyone could hear the emotion in this guy's voice as he told this experience... he didn't need to say how it was etched into his memory.

A lot of research is used in the program to complement the narrative component. This research shows that one of the (many) key roles of managers is to filter organisational communication and behaviour. All very logical one thinks, but what does it mean? One participant related her experience when her manager was away recently.

She was working on something involving an external regulatory authority that her boss would have normally handled. To ensure she had the full context she sought a meeting with the Director (her boss's manager) to discuss her ideas and approach. She got the information she needed and the task was completed. But, when her manager returned to work the Director expressed his dissatisfaction to the manager, expressing the view that she should have been more fully prepared for the meeting and that the work she bought to the meeting was "crap". The manager told her of the Director's dissatisfaction, and the net result was a very demotivated staff member who started looking for another job. Her manager had been presented with a perfect opportunity to act as a filter, but chose to simply be a one-way valve for unfair and negative feedback.

Of course there are a million perspectives one could take on this story. But the anecdote does provide a clear illustration of how the manager could act as a 'filter' for organisational communication and behaviour.

Three types of collaboration

Collaboration is the act of working with people to get something done. We can look at collaboration at three levels within the enterprise.

In Team Collaboration, the members of the group are known, there are clear task interdependencies, expected reciprocity, and explicit timelines and goals. To achieve the goal, members must fulfil their tasks within the stated time. Team Collaboration often suggests that while there is often explicit leadership, the participants cooperate on an equal footing and will receive equal recognition. An example is a research project to develop a prototype for X in five months with six team members and a set of resources.

In Community Collaboration, there is a shared domain or area of interest, but the goal is more often on learning, rather than task. People share and build knowledge, rather than complete projects. Membership may be bounded and explicit, but periods are often open or "ongoing." Membership is often on equal footing, but more experienced practitioners may have more status or power in the community. Reciprocity is within the group, but not always one to one ("I did this for you, now you do this for me.") An example might be a community of practice that is interested in the type of research mentioned in the team example above. A member of that team may come to her community and ask for examples of past projects.

Network Collaboration steps beyond the relationship centric nature of team and community collaboration. It is collaboration that starts in individual action and self interest and accrues to the network. Membership and timelines are open and unbounded. There are no explicit roles. Members most likely do not know all the other members. Power is distributed. This form of collaboration is driven by the advent of social software, a response to the overwhelming volume of information we are creating. It's impossible for an individual to cope on their own.

An example of network collaboration might be members of the team in the first example above bookmarking web sites as they find them. This benefits their team, possibly their related communities of practice but it also benefits the wider network of people interested in the topic. At the same time, they may find other bookmarks left by network members relevant to their team work. This sort of network activity benefits the individual and a network of people reciprocally over time. The reciprocity connection is remote and undefined. You act in self-interest but provide a network-wide benefit.