We remember what we feel.

Hi there {FIRST_NAME},

Our work at Anecdote is well and truly focussed on helping leaders get their strategies to stick using stories. So as we head into the new year, with new strategies to implement, we thought we should dedicate this newsletter to the issue of bringing strategies to life.

In this edition, we have:

• Book Review — Yes! by Goldstein, Martin and Cialdini
• Technique — Archetypes
• What's happening — What we're up to!
• Blog posts you might have missed — The role of emotion in decision making
• Productivity — Updating the same document at the same time

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.

Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive

— by Goldstein, Martin and Cialdini

Ever since stumbling across Robert Cialdini's classic, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, in the mid 90s I've been fascinated with how our minds accept some ideas and reject others. So whilst strolling with Patrick Lambe in September through the amazing book store in Singapore, Kinokuniya, I was pleasantly surprised to see Golstein, Martin and Cialdini had a new book out called Yes: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive.

There are two reasons why I love this type of book. First, scientific experiments make for terrific stories—I've blogged about this recently when commenting about Dan Pink's latest video on motivation. These experiments involve people doing things and often something unexpected happens—sounds like the ingredients for a good story. For example, how do you reduce the amount of petrified wood stolen from a national park?

Cialdini and his colleagues wanted to know if the way the warning signs were worded would have an impact on the amount of wood stolen. They started their study by invisibly marking the petrified wood adjacent to a path. Then they created three situations, two with signs and the third (the control) without a sign.

The first sign read: "Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the natural state of the Petrified Forest."

The second sign said: "Please don't remove the petrified wood from the park, in order to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest." It also had a picture of a lone visitor stealing wood with circle and cross at the point where the hand was picking up the wood.

The results: with no sign 2.92% of the wood was stolen. With the first sign (everyone else is doing it) 7.92% was stolen. Twice as much as having no sign! And with the second sign 1.67% was stolen.

Personally I think the first sign was a bit weak because it wasn't strong enough on what not to do. The sign that prompted their investigation in the first place would have been better: "You heritage is being vandalised every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a small piece at a time."

So you need to be careful to say how popular an unwanted behaviour is. I've seen this mistake made by online community facilitators who bemoan to their members that hardly anyone is participating in the online conversations. All this serves to do is reinforce in the members' minds that is probably not worthwhile to contribute online. Instead the facilitators should be talking about how many interesting things are happening.

My second reason for liking this book is that the suggestions are supported by evidence. Too many practitioners in our fields of strategy, change and narrative are making no attempt to root their practice in research and evidence. 'Yes' does a tremendous job of pointing us to the original research that support their claims.

Yes! has 50 short chapters each delving into an aspect of influence research. There are lots of stories backed up with amble references. The chapters have names like "Which office item can make your influence stick?" and "When can asking for a little go along way?" While sparking curiosity in the first reading these titles become entirely frustrating when you are trying to find a particular influence axiom like "We are more influenced by people just like us." Consequently I'm making my own notes on the contents page of my copy.

The book is well written with a good sense of humour and has lots of practical tips. Highly recommended.

Reviewed by: Shawn Callahan

Creating your company's archetypes

We have been extracting archetypes from stories for ages. The method we use has evolved considerably from the original approach learned at IBM almost 10 years ago from Shawn's colleague, Sharon Darwent. We have also learned some important tips from working with Patrick Lambe this year.

The technique enables you to represent the culture of a group as a series of archetypal characters. There are five steps in the process:

1. Start with a set of anecdotes of things that have happened to the group you're exploring. These stories might be around a theme such as leadership, community, or perhaps around the stated values of the organisation. We typically use anecdote circles to collect these stories.
2. Stick the stories on the walls and ask the workshop participants to read the stories and write on post-it notes the characters they see in the stories. The characters might be things like leader, analyst, graduate, client, colleague. Each story should have 2-3 or so post-it notes with one character on each one.
3. Then ask the participants to write on post-its (a different colour) the attributes that describe that character. Attributes could be traits such as arrogant, helpful, conservative, focused, outgoing. Each character might have 5-10 attributes.
4. Remove all the attributes and put them on their own wall and ask the workshop participants to cluster those attributes that they feel make sense together.
5. Have the group name and draw the archetype that emerges from the process.

Consulting Engagements and Projects:

We have a a whole swag of new projects to tell you about.

• Creating the strategic story for an insurance firm.
• Creating the strategic story for an IT division
• Lessons learning for a government agency
• Embedding values for a university library
• Helping graduate employees learn how to elicit stories from their company's experts
• Training leaders in storytelling techniques

Upcoming Events that we're running or attending:

A special event for our clients. In June 2009 Shawn went to London to present Anecdote's workshops on storytelling for leaders and how to make your strategy stick with stories. On that visit he had the pleasure in meeting Kevin Bishop from The Royal Bank of Scotland. Kevin was doing terrific work in influencing change at the bank across a division of 45,000 people. We were so impressed that we have convinced Kevin, a kiwi living abroad, to come to Australia and present a one-off workshop with us on influencing change and inciting action using the natural power of stories.

Melbourne: 25 February
Sydney: 4 March
Cost: $1,495 per person ($995 if you book before 30th December 2009)

Shawn is presenting to Ark Group's Internal Communication connected forum, taking place 22-24 February 2010 in Melbourne. The presentation is entitled: Bringing your strategy to life using the natural power of stories.

The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss

The November/December 2009 issue of Scientific American Mind has an article on 'The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss.' The article covers covers some key thoughts on why smart people do not-so-smart things. Several concepts caught my eye. The first of these is the tendency for the vast majority of us to be cognitive misers.

To illustrate, answer this question. Jack is looking at Anne but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married but George is not. Is an unmarried person looking at an unmarried person? A) Yes. B) No. C) Cannot be determined.

More than 80% of people choose C. But the correct answer is A. Try it again looking at all the options. Essentially, most of us are cognitive misers and our minds use the cognitive processing approach that uses the least processing power, even if it is less accurate. Having higher IQ doesn't reduce the likelihood of making this error.

When thinking about strategy implementation, or any change initiative, another concept is worth bearing in mind. This is the 'my side bias', the tendency to reason from an egocentric perspective. An experiment was conducted in the U.S. using the following [expurgated] scenario:

'A German car has been found to be significantly more dangerous in accidents than other vehicles. Should the vehicle be banned from U.S. streets?'

74% of people thought the vehicle should be banned from U.S streets.

Another group were presented with a different scenario. 'The Ford Explorer has been found to be significantly more dangerous in accidents than other vehicles. Germany is considering restricting sale or use of the Ford Explorer. Do you think the Ford Explorer should be banned from being driven on German streets.'

This time, only 39% thought the vehicle should be banned from German streets.

This study shows how we tend to evaluate a situation from our own perspective. Understanding the perspective of staff will be a critical aspect of executing strategy and participative approaches are essential to achieve this. No wonder people interpret things differently than we intend.

The role of emotion in decision making

In 2004 Drew Westen and his colleagues put together an experiment to see how people of a particular political persuasion (Democrat or Republican) make sense of new information. Drew is a neuroscientist and advises political candidates on how to garner voter support. In this experiment he scanned the brains of 15 committed Democrats and 15 committed Republicans while showing them slides of conflicting information. Here are two examples:

Democrat example

Initial statement (Slide 1): During the first Gulf War, John Kerry wrote to a constituent: "Thank you for contacting me to express your opposition ... I share your concerns. I voted in favor of a resolution that would have insisted that economic sanctions be given more time to work."

Contradiction (Slide 2): Seven days later, Kerry wrote to a different constituent, "Thank you for expressing your support for the Iraqi invasion of Kawait. From the outset of the invasion, I have strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush's response to the crisis."

Republican example

Initial statement (Slide 1): "Having been here and seeing the care that these troops get is comforting for me and Laura. We are, should, and must provide the best care for anybody who is willing to put their life in harm's way for our country."—President Bush, 2003, visiting a Veterans Administration Hospital.

Contradiction (Slide 2): Mr Bush's visit came on the same day that the Administration announced its immediate cutoff of VA hospital access to approximately 164,000 veterans.

The committed Democrats and Republicans had no problem seeing the contradiction for the other party and rated the contradiction on average 4 out of 5 but this contradiction was nearly invisible for their own party where they rated it on average 2 out of 5. And the control group without an affinity saw all the contradictions.

Now that result might be obvious but Drew and his team were scanning these people's brains at the same time as they were assessing this new information and they found something that is fascinating. The brains did register the conflict as an unpleasant emotion but for the political partisans they were able to shutdown that distress quickly through faulty reasoning. But here's the thing. Once the negative emotions turned off, the positive emotions turned on. They weren't just feeling a little better, they were feeling good.

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.

By Shawn Callahan

Etherpad

Mark is based in Canberra and I'm in Melbourne so as you can imagine we spend a lot of time working together using Skype (internet phone, and it's free). Yesterday we were working on our strategic story when we realised it would be great for both of us to be able to type into a document at the same time and see the changes in real time. I remembered coming across a free tool to do that but couldn't remember what it was called so Mark and I both searched our Delicious bookmarks and came up trumps: etherpad.

This encounter reminded me how useful social bookmarking can be. Back in 2006 I wrote a little blog post on how to use Delicious. Worth checking out and building it in to your daily collaboration practices.