Imagination is more important than knowledge—and we imagine in stories.

Good morning {FIRST_NAME},

Einstein once said that imagination is more important than knowledge. To evoke new possibilities in our mind's eye is the foundation for creativity, and therefore progress. And the role of stories is fundamental. We've said it before but it's worth repeating: stories are more about pictures than words; every story conjures images for us. We imagine the future and recall the past as stories. What would your workplace be like if it embraced stories? Perhaps our little newsletter can nudge you and your organisation in that direction.

In this edition, we have:

• Book Review — Digital Habitats
• What's happening — What we're up to!
• Learning from engagements — Storytelling creates trust
• Blog posts you might have missed — Worthwhile work
• Productivity — remembering a password
• Breaking News — New website coming

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

Please contact us with your comments, suggestion and ideas.

Digital Habitats

— by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John D. Smith

I’m often the technology steward for communities of practice (CoP). I create the Ning spaces and configure ‘em, I setup the email lists, I work out whether we should have a wiki or a blog or a discussion forum or some other combination of communication technologies. As you can see I’m quite a geek: I really do love it.

And whenever I get stuck I’ll contact my friends at CPSquare: Etienne, Nancy and John. And while I know they all have a deep understanding of CoPs I tend to ask Etienne the theory questions, Nancy the technology questions and John the group dynamics questions. Together they are a formidable team. Sadly I think their new book, Digital Habitats, will give them strong cause to suggest I should RTFM: Read The Flipping Manual.

Digital Habitats (DH) has a single goal: to help the reader understand the role of technology steward in cultivating a community of practice: what is it, why you would do it, are you are cut out for it, how to do it and where to find help. But it is not a shoppers guide nor a roadmap for technology selection.

There is a lovely photo of Etienne, Nancy and John in the preface and I feel that reading DH is like have a friendly conversation with them on a sunny balcony. They provide the context, a little theory, then lots of practical tips supported by real life stories to ground it and make it memorable.

For me there are three ideas in this book I have already put into practice with great effect.

Experience shows us that all know that communities of practice are different, and sometimes poles apart. DH introduces the idea of community orientations to help us understand where the emphasis might lie and therefore what technologies make most sense.

There are 9 orientations: meetings, open-ended conversations, projects, content, access to expertise, relationships, individual participation, community participation, serving a context. With my engineering communities, for example, I’ve asked the members where they see their current orientation and then ask them to identify where they would like to be. A community might start off very content focussed but realise that the real benefits will come from providing access to expertise. By understanding this orientation gap the technology steward can start introducing tools to facilitate the future orientation needs.

The second idea I find useful is how my friends (I was going to say ‘the authors’ but it didn’t feel right) describe the range of activities a community might be engaged in. The axis range from informal to formal and learning from to learning with. This diagram helps me ensure I’m thinking about the full range of possibilities when helping communities members design their CoP.

DH envisages three types of readers: deep divers, attentive practitioners and just do it-ers. The just do it-ers are directed to chapter 10 which contains an action notebook. It is a series of checklists to help you think about the role of the technology steward. What I love about chapter 10 is that I can jump in and start learning about the role by doing things and then come back to the descriptions contained in the rest of the book when it is more meaningful for me. DH makes the job of finding the relevant descriptions in the other chapters easy through a multitude of cross-links from chapter 10 to the relevant book section.

There are very few practical community of practice books available (I can think of 3 others) and Etienne has already had a hand in writing one of them. So Digital Habitats is a valuable addition to this exclusive club. It’s highly readable and practical and will definitely help make a difference to the quality of your technology support for your community of practice.

Reviewed by: Shawn Callahan

Consulting Engagements and Projects:

Our main focus for our consulting engagements is helping organisations use the natural power of stories to bring their strategies to life. We are currently using our techniques to help an organisation execute its IT strategy, embedding values using stories, helping teachers be more innovative, and helping managers of Aboriginal staff in a large government department better deal with workplace dilemmas.

Upcoming Events that we're running or attending:

• Shawn is presenting at Celebrating Story: Approaching Change One Story at a Time in Melbourne on the 8th and 9th or October.
• Mark is running a workshop in conjunction with the People Development and KM conference in Sydney on 28 October.

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Connecting people with stories

A couple of weeks ago I was in Singapore for the Asian Storytelling Festival. Patrick Lambe and I ran a couple of workshops, one on personal storytelling for leaders and the other covering business narrative techniques for change. Just over 70 people attended each workshop and Patrick warned me that it might be tough getting people to ask questions from the floor. Asian audiences are renowned for saying very little in large groups but I was hopeful that by getting everyone telling each other stories would change that.

We started the two days with a simple introduction exercise where was asked people to find others who shared a characteristic, like their favourite fruit (there was talk of me trying Durian, which I'm keen to do), favourite movie genre, favourite restaurant cuisine. There was lots of noise, it was a good laugh.

Then we got into some storytelling starting with a jumpstart storytelling session As always this exercise gets everyone very well connected and creates an atmosphere of collaboration.

Just as an aside, I was chatting to Noa Baum (professional storyteller), and she was saying that she is reluctant to use the selection part of jumpstart (putting the hand on the shoulder of the story you liked the most) because she feels it reinforces the belief among those people who are not selected that they are not a good storyteller. Reinforcing the myth that some people are storytellers and others are not is a problem because we are all telling stories to one another all the time whether we want to or not. We are all storytellers. Jumpstart selection could be working against helping work this out.

Well, after the introduction exercise and the jumpstart a large majority participated asking questions, providing opinions and telling stories. I think Patrick was pleasantly surprised.

Meaningful work

Is there a movement toward meaningful and worthwhile work? Are people increasingly interested in pursuing work that contributes to a more equitable, just, sustainable and inclusive world? Do people increasingly want work that makes the most of their talents? A job they are proud of?

It’s certainly getting a push from Gen X and Gen Y concerns about sustainability and purpose, but the trend seems much broader. The rise of thinking in areas such as appreciative inquiry, social responsibility, positive psychology, workplace happiness and complexity together with a raft of applications for narrative (both storytelling and narrative insight / storylistening) are other indicators.

A sizeable UK study in January 2008 suggested that "over three quarters of working people in the UK are concerned that the job they do should be worthwhile and almost half hanker after a job that is more worthwhile than the one they have at the moment."

Another indicator of the rise of worthwhile work is the emergence of organisations such as EthicalJobs that connects people who are looking for worthwhile work with employers who offer jobs that make a difference. I like that these guys promote their brand image like this..."our office runs on 100% Green Power, we drink 100% FairTrade tea and coffee, and we use only bikes, feet and public transport to get around" They recently published survey results suggesting that there is a movement towards worthwhile work with many people prepared to take a decent pay cut to get such jobs.

For me there is one other key aspect of worthwhile work - being valued. This is an area where managers have an incredible influence of the extent to which people consider their work as being worthwhile. Why do we have workplaces that cause my sister to start crying while we are cleaning up after dinner on Friday night when she explains how her boss treats her like dirt.

Managers need to be mindful that a key part of their role is to build engagement and to create more interactions like this one ...

"My brand new manager (a young up-and-comer) rang me on Friday afternoon as I was driving home. He said "I'm just ringing to let you know how much I value what you do. You regularly top the sales results and have been doing that for years. I wanted to make sure you knew that what you do is noticed and how much it is appreciated. Have a great weekend." I had to pull over to the side of the road. In the past eleven years, through three previous managers, no-one had ever said anything like that to me before. I started crying ..."

There is a trend toward worthwhile work. And there are huge advantages for all of us in accelerating and broadening its uptake.

By Mark Schenk

Memorable and hard to crack passwords

Here's a simple idea for creating password that are difficult to crack but easy to remember.

Think of a phrase that you want to tell yourself on a regular basis, such as "I'm dedicated to returning humanity to organisations."

Then take the first letter from each word in the phrase, and viola, you have a password, in this case it is Idtrhto.

A new website is coming

Keep an eye on www.anecdote.com because over the next few weeks a new website will appear that will herald a new phase in Anecdote’s history.

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