We attend to what we are capable of understanding

Good morning {FIRST_NAME},

This newsletter is all about decisions: the psychology of how we make them when things are complex, the values that influence our decisions, and how we plan and strategize using stories. Organisations are essentially the result of the many decisions everyone is making every day.

In this edition, we have:

• Book Review — Streetlights and Shadows by Gary Klein
• Technique — Increasing story richness
• What's happening — What we're up to!
• Learning from engagements — Corporate values
• Blog posts you might have missed — More than just a launch
• Productivity — Livescribe Pen

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.

Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making

— by Gary Klein

When I first heard the title of Gary Klein’s latest book, Streetlights and Shadows, I immediately thought of the joke about the drunk who’d lost his keys and was looking for them under a street lamp. Not long after that I had the good fortune to have dinner with Gary and Patrick Lambe (thanks Patrick) in the old red light district of Singapore so I asked him if that’s what the title meant. “You got it Shawn. But I’m surprised at how many people haven’t heard the joke so I included the it in the front of the book.” Here is how Gary tells it.

A policeman saw a drunk searching for something under a streetlight. “What have you lost, my friend?” the policeman asked. “My keys,” said the drunk. The policeman then helped the drunk look and finally asked him: “Where exactly did you drop them then?” “Over there,” responded the drunk, pointing toward a dark alley. The policemen then asked: “Why are you looking here?” The drunk immediately replied: “Because the light is so much brighter here.”

According to Gary this is his last book. I suspect it’s what you say just after you’ve just completed one. It builds perfectly from Sources of Power, which describes Gary’s theory of how we make decisions based on pattern recognition, and Intuition at Work, which is a practical guide on how to build your intuitive abilities to make decisions. Streetlights and Shadows is the myth-buster book. Gary takes to task 11 commonly held beliefs by managers and shows us that they are necessarily true when things get complex, fast and unpredictable.

Here are the commonly held beliefs. Which ones do you believe are rock solid regardless of the type of situation you’re facing?

1. Teaching people procedures helps them perform tasks more skilfully.
2. Decision biases distort our thinking.
3. Successful decision makers rely on logic and statistics instead of logic.
4. To make a decision, generate several options and compare them to pick the best one.
5. We can reduce uncertainty by gathering more information.
6. It’s bad to jump to conclusions—wait to see all the evidence.
7. To get people to learn, give them feedback on the consequences of their actions.
8. To make sense of a situation, we draw inferences from the data.
9. The starting point for any project is to get a clear description of the goal.
10. Our plans will succeed more often if we ID the biggest risks and find ways to eliminate them.
11. Leaders can create common ground by assigning roles and setting ground rules in advance.

Gary dedicates a chapter to each of these 11 propositions and artfully explores the issues around each. Being both a consultant and academic he does a tremendous job of sharing his own experiences and that of his colleagues as well as pointing us to the relevant research. And of course it’s jam packed with stories which immediately makes this a valuable book for anyone interested in how stories provide context and helps us understand complex issues.

While enjoying our chocolate cake desserts I asked Gary what impact did Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, which Gary’s work features in, have on his business. In his typically understated style he said, “It sure helped spread the word on what we are doing.” Of course Gary’s first testimonial on the dust cover is from Gladwell who says: “I know of no one who combines theory and observation—intellectual rigor and painstaking observation of the real world—so brilliantly and gracefully as Gary Klein.”

This is one of my favourite business books of 2009.

Reviewed by: Shawn Callahan

Increasing story richness

Here is little technique the playback theatre folk used at the Celebrating Story Conference which I think is great. I will be using it to help people enrich their visual palette when telling a story. Pair people up: a storyteller and a listener. The storyteller has to start their story by describing the place where the story begins: “It all started in a tiny red brick house on the upside of the street. The poplar trees were blowing in the wind and my Dad was sitting on the front steps ...” That sort of thing. The listener then has the job of interrupting the story at anytime to get more description. “Popular tree?” they might ask, at which point the teller needs to say more about the popular trees until the listener says “continue.” The storyteller then just keeps telling their story from that point on. One of the variations they had us do is then walk side by side and talk about our stories. There is something about strolling which improves the conversation. I’m sure Jane Austen would have had something to say about this phenomenon.

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Consulting Engagements and Projects:

Our Making Strategies Stick program is being well received. We started another project for a large insurance company helping them tell their strategic story and engage the staff in the strategy process. It's all about embedding the understanding throughout the organisation.

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:

Mark is presenting Storytelling for Leaders at the People Development and KM conference in Sydney.

Shawn’s presentation to Singapore’s IKMS on collaboration and storytelling is available online at http://blip.tv/file/2742497 and http://blip.tv/file/2742915

Nancy White is visiting Australia and we are hosting her at one of our clients. If you are interested in communities of practice, online facilitation or would like to meet one of the co-authors of Digital Habitats, visit http://nancywhiteoz.wordpress.com/

Terrence Garguilo and Shawn ran a webinar on storytelling for leaders last month. If you would like to see the recording just visit here

Corporate values

Most organisations we know have a set of stated values. You know what we 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 us 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.

Shawn was reading a paper by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras and they suggest an alternative set of questions (in our 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 Shawn found really interesting was the examples Collins and Porras gave and how each company held a different set, the usual suspects weren't repeated: they didn't all have to value innovation, or customer service, or integrity. The lists we're 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 we worked at SMS (Australian consulting company) in the 90s we had three values: add value, maintain unity, enhance reputation. Shawn knew what the 2nd and 3rd values meant but 'add value' was a bit fuzzy for him. Value fuzziness is a common problem. And you've probably guessed what we're going to suggest as a way to provide meaning: that's right, STORIES.

Imagine if for every corporate value everyone can tell one or more stories to illustrate what that values means. We often ask people to give an example to illustrate a value and in many cases all we get is a very intense look of someone desperately trying to remember a story to tell. We'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.

Unsafe Behavior Related to Health, Safety, and Environmental Issues Looks Like …

To save money at his plant, Sam provides half the number of safety goggles as there are employees on the line and instructs them to share.

Piette, the plant operations manager, instructs her people to dump used machine oil on unused acreage at the back of the facility.

Al, the plant manager, allows the contractor responsible for the removal of organic waste material to dump it in a local lake.

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 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.

More than a launch

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.

By Shawn Callahan

Livescribe Pen

Yeh, OK, I admit it, I'm a gadget guy. I drive Mark mad trying out the beta software for this and that and getting hold of the latest gadgets. But this time even Mark had to admit it was a great productivity tool. It's called a Livescribe Pen.

We collect stories from people in the workplace. So we used to always keep our digital recorder handy for such occasions. Not any more. Instead we have our Livescribe Pen which allows us to take notes on paper and then have these notes copied to our computers. The notes are then fully searchable (even my handwriting is searchable). Now here is the beautiful thing: you can record the audio while you are taking notes and the pen synchronises your notes with the audio so that when you click with the pen on any text it will replay the audio that was being recorded when you wrote that note.

Worth checking out http://www.livescribe.com/ In Australia you can buy them at OfficeWorks for about $350.