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Places to meet for communities - an important ingredient

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:48:08 +1100

Three weeks ago I arrived in London for a couple of weeks work and a couple weeks holiday. One of my must-see destinations was the water pump in Broadwick Street, Soho, which was the main contamination source for the 1854 cholera outbreak (my family think I'm crazy). This pump is also the star attraction on John Snow's famous map showing the geographic distribution of deaths from the cholera outbreak and is one of the earliest example of epidemiology (in case you were wondering, I studied geography at uni). So imagine my surprise when I arrived at the pump to find it was also a community of practice meeting spot for Soho cycle couriers.

I wandered about the pump for a while taking photos (to the cyclists' amusement) and listened to their conversation, which of course consisted of telling stories of what happened in the morning and over the week. Nothing written down, no social software, just oral storytelling.

Finding or creating these places for community in organisations is an important step is supporting communities of practice. Ideally they should be somewhere you can eat, chat informally and know that when you arrive, there will be other people just like you to share your stories with.

You might be thinking, but what if my organisation is distributed and we can't get everyone in one place? Well, do what the London taxi drivers do, form clusters across the network to tell your stories. Here's a photo of one group of taxi drivers who meet on Russell Square (there is a little group of them behind the silver taxi).

To link across the small groupings the taxi drivers use technology: blogs, newspapers, websites, radio.

Meeting in small clusters for oral storytelling and linking across these clusters for wider knowledge sharing might be a useful pattern to adopt in organisations.

Two ears, one mouth

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:51:36 +1100

I can't remember who first said to me "you have two ears and one mouth, and you should use them in that proportion" but it is one of the best pieces of advice I have ever received. Also, when working in many organisations, I notice it is not applied that widely. Shawn and I have come across two examples earlier this year where 'listeners' were let go and noisy and opinionated people were never considered to be candidates for retrenchment because of their 'visible contribution' to the organisation (it was probably more their 'audible contribution'). These sorts of decisions further undermine an organisation's capability to make progress with complex problems.

Listening has a vital role in tackling complex problems, such as any change initiative, either social or organisational. We use our Narrative Insight (story listening) techniques to explore and help make sense of the patterns relating to these complex issues. The following excerpt from The McKinsey Quarterly emphasizes why we should put more effort into listening and less into telling:

In a famous behavioral experiment, half the participants are randomly assigned a lottery ticket number while the others are asked to write down any number they would like on a blank ticket. Just before drawing the winning number, the researchers offer to buy back the tickets from their holders. The result: no matter what geography or demographic environment the experiment has taken place in, researchers have always found that they have to pay at least five times more to those who came up with their own number.

The lesson is clear - you need to listen to and act on the needs and perspectives of the stakeholders. Even if you don't like what they are saying. People value what they have a sense of ownership in and you need to listen to find out what that is. And where there is anger, resentment etc around an issue I have found the advice of Professor Brenda Dervin to be spot on.."anger dissipates when people are listened to".

If you happen to know of the original research referred to in the McKinsey article we would love to hear about it.

Reference: 1. The McKinsey Quarterly 2009 Number 2, pages 101-109

Don't second guess me

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:24:28 +1100

I am working on a project requiring a major organisational transformation. On Monday, the division's chief heads off to Canberra to get a mandate to make the change from head office. One of his biggest concerns is head office continuously second-guessing him as he leads the organisation through the change process. He recognises that in complex situations there are no correct answers and there are likely to be many different opinions about what should be done, and head office has a habit of trying to micro-manage things.

I suggested using a story to demonstrate how head office second guessing might be fatal to the change process. This story from a BBC program 'The Human Mind' came to mind:

In October 2001, a fire crew was fighting a fire in a disused bingo hall in Leicester in the UK. Even though it was big, the fire chief decided it was safe enough to send the crew into the building. They were starting to make progress in knocking the fire down when the fire chief decided something was wrong, and ordered his team out of the building. The team protested, unwilling to give up the progress they had made. But the fire chief insisted and as they exited the building it exploded in a massive fireball. If the decision to evacuate hadn't been made the entire team would have been killed. It turns out that the fire was one of the rarest and most dangerous phenomenon in firefighting - a backdraft. The fire chief had never experienced a backdraft before, he just knew that something was wrong and they needed to get out. In the ensuing investigation it turns out there were three things that were unusual: the smoke was more orange than usual, air was rushing into the building rather than out of it, and the fire was unusually quiet. The fire chief was right in his decision, he just didn't know why at the time.

Relating the story to being second-guessed by head office might go like this. "Imagine if head office were there at that fire. There was no evidence that anything unusual was happening, the team were arguing against the chief (they wanted to stay and fight the fire) and they were making good progress. Chances are that head office would have overruled the fire chief and told him to keep fighting the fire, and the entire team would have been killed. And the head office decision would have been perfectly rational and the whole thing written off as a tragic accident."

Publicsphere - Government 2.0

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 07:00:38 +1100

Senator Kate Lundy hosted yesterday's Publicsphere #2 event on Government 2.0. I attended Parliament House for the morning and 'watched' online throughout the afternoon (using the live blog, video stream and the twitter traffic (#publicsphere). It was interesting to watch presentations to an audience of 150 people, the majority of whom had laptops open and were twittering (about the event in the main) and googling relevant info to add into the twitter traffic. Personally, I felt a little overwhelmed by the many channels of information and didn't get much value from the presentations themselves.

Things I liked about the event were:

15 minute presentation format - this forced speakers to have a few clear messages
The diverse technologies available meant there was something for everyone
Meeting some very interesting people and catching up with some people that I haven't seen for ages
It was very well organised and all up it ran pretty smoothly
Seeing the passion in Kate Lundy's eyes for getting this stuff happening

Things I didn't like about the event were:

A constant stream of presentations with no provision for discussion. It appeared that the organisers thought that electronic interaction via twitter and commenting on the live blog obviated the need for people to speak to each other. Exacerbating this was the preference for eating into the few breaks to make up time.
Realising that I couldn't cope too well with the multiple inputs while attempting to build a mind map of things that resonated with me (and watching others appear to handle it with ease). I did learn a lot about twitter on the day.

One of the key themes was the urgent need for change in the people component of the equation. Politicians and public servants live in a culture where behaviour is focussed on control of information, avoidance of risk etc. Not that they have any bad intent, they just live in a world where this is the norm. Nearly every speaker touched on this issue. Nonetheless I expect that tradition will hold and only a miniscule proportion of funding will address the change component. One approach is to find out government positive deviants and work out how to influence others to adopt their behaviours and methods. There must be some out there.

Not just a journey...

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 23:45:22 +1100

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.

Useful conversations for fledgling CoP

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 23:18:12 +1100

On Tuesday I worked with three new communities of practice in a government agency. Each group was quite different but in all of them we talked about the things the groups should do first. I promised to send them ideas on conversations they might consider early on. Here is what I have come up with so far.

Purpose: an important discussion early on is to determine the purpose of the group - why it exists. While many groups will have similar descriptions of their purpose (learning, tap into the organisation's knowledge in the domain, solve problems faster, standardise practices etc), each group needs to have this conversation.

Knowledge Market: this process encourages participants to identify things they can offer (specific techniques, documents etc) and things they need to learn or need help with. This process can be done face to face or via teleconference. It helps the group build relationships and to start sharing their knowledge and expertise.

Community Orientations: a concept developed by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith and described here. In this activity groups discuss the areas they will focus mostly on in the short term.

Discussion tables. This activity is designed to get groups talking about the things they can do to improve their practice in the selected domain. In this conversation useful things to think about are things that will make the biggest difference for the domain and things that will make their work easier/better/more enjoyable/more rewarding.

What others are there?

Newsletter Addenda

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:14:00 +1100

Newsletter subscriber, Ross Nicholson, rightly points out that Tom Peter's said "Ready, fire, aim" not "Ready, aim, fire," which I incorrectly wrote in the last newsletter. It seems automatic pilot kicked in as I was writing that sentence.

By the way, did you know you can see all our newsletters online? Just go to http://www.anecdote.com.au/newsletters.php We typically published the newsletter online a week after we email it to our subscribers.

Why don't positive stories carry?

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:42:35 +1100

Something got me thinking about City of Port Phillip's Non Crime Hotline this morning. They have a phone number you call to report good news stories. I rang the council and found that Peter Strecker was now in charge of this initiative and he told me that it was in hibernation. It turned out that they got very few calls. There received some great stories, like the one about the busker who had a fight erupt in front of him so he started playing "Always look on the bright side of life" and everyone started laughing and the fight stopped. But there wasn't enough to sustain the program. So why are we reluctant to share positive stories?

Perhaps part of the reason is that it's hard to see the impact sharing a positive story might have. When we tell the busker story we can see it's amusing and uplifting but perhaps not that instructional unless you're a busker. Whereas a negative story gives us a warning on what to avoid. Consequently we are only willing to exert a small effort to pass on positive stories and ringing a hotline and listening to a recorded message might be too much of an impost. If we were aggrieved in some way (a negative story) we probably have more energy to have our story heard and therefore more willing to jump through some hoops.

The co-evolution of technology and organising

Fri, 22 May 2009 15:02:42 +1100

The technology we use changes the way we organise and the way we organise effects the technologies we use. This hand-in-glove interaction is called co-evolution. Take the example of the invention of the spinning frame during the industrial revolution of the 18th century. The spinning frame made possible large scale cloth production and created the need for factories, which in turn affected how water and steam were used to drive machinery in those factories.¹

Are we seeing a similar co-evolution between information dissemination technology and how knowledge programs are organised? The two killer apps for the PC have been the word processor and the spreadsheet. With these two tools we were able to create documents. Consequently many knowledge sharing initiatives focus on creating and sharing documents. This limited us to sharing what we could write down.

YouTube started in 2005 (here is the first video uploaded to the site). It’s a site for sharing videos. Now that it's easy to share videos more companies are building this form of information dissemination into its knowledge sharing programs. The interesting thing is that the tool changes the type of knowledge shared. It seems to me that videos encourage us to share practices and tell a story of what happened or how to do something. This type of knowledge helps us share values, principles and lessons in a more compact and digestible way. Sure, documents can be used to do that too but that wasn’t the default use and it took so much effort.

As we witness the rise of the video we'll need to develop other skills to make the most of it. Most importantly, you guessed it, video creators will need to be adept at finding and telling stories. Just as we learned the language of documents (structure, headings, font sizes, margins, footnotes etc.) we will need to learn the language of video. And that language will partly involve characters, events, action, time and place.

1. Beinhocker, E. D. (2006). The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics. Boston, Harvard Business School Press.

London public workshops in June

Fri, 22 May 2009 09:02:50 +1100

Just a quick note to say it is just over 4 weeks before we get together in London for our two workshops (24 & 25 June). Looks like we have a good turn out but if you are thinking of coming along I need to get all the registrations complete in the next two weeks.

Send me an email if you want a registration form and here is the description of the two narrative based workshops.

And just to get a bit of a flavour for my approach you might like to check out this presentation I did this week.

Storytelling for Community Engagement

View more presentations from ShawnCallahan.

How to be memorable and inspire action at work by telling stories

Wed, 13 May 2009 15:47:51 +1100

Thanks to all my Twitter friends who helped me refine this article. It was a fun process that reinforces for me the strength of social computing approaches for collaboration.

The main purpose of this whitepaper is to introduce senior leaders to the idea of business storytelling and demonstrate its importance, especially in the increasingly complex and unpredictable world we live in. It also provides some approaches to how you find and recount your experiences in a business context.

I encourage you to send a copy to your CEO, or better still your CFO and CIO, and help them realise that people only remember what they feel and despite the painful sounding name, people don't feel bullet points.

Stories and video how-to guides—screencasting Salesforce.com

Wed, 13 May 2009 07:47:01 +1100

A couple of week ago a 28 year old naval engineer delivered his baby son based on watching some DIY YouTube videos. When I heard this news I realised that the DIY video's time had come and it wouldn't be too long before we see its wide adoption in organisations.

I've been a long-time user of screencasting technology such as ScreenFlow as a way of recording how to do things on your computer. As an example here is a 3 minute guide on how to establish a cash flow schedule in Salesforce.com.

How to establish a schedule in Salesforce from Shawn Callahan on Vimeo.

Notice how I've preceded the instructions with a story that conveys why it's important to go through these steps.

The TED presentation commandments

Tue, 12 May 2009 18:35:59 +1100

Thou Shalt Not Simply Trot Out thy Usual Shtick.
Thou Shalt Dream a Great Dream, or Show Forth a Wondrous New Thing, Or Share Something Thou Hast Never Shared Before
Thou Shalt Reveal thy Curiosity and Thy Passion.
Thou Shalt Tell a Story.
Thou Shalt Freely Comment on the Utterances of Other Speakers for the Sake of Blessed Connection and Exquisite Controversy.
Thou Shalt Not Flaunt thine Ego. Be Thou Vulnerable. Speak of thy Failure as well as thy Success.
Thou Shalt Not Sell from the Stage: Neither thy Company, thy Goods, thy Writings, nor thy Desperate need for Funding; Lest Thou be Cast Aside into Outer Darkness.
Thou Shalt Remember all the while: Laughter is Good.
Thou Shalt Not Read thy Speech.
Thou Shalt Not Steal the Time of Them that Follow Thee.

If you don't know what TED is, you don't know what you are missing. You can see some of my favourite TED videos here.

This list is from Presentation Zen.

Creating stories

Sun, 10 May 2009 21:21:40 +1100

My friend Terrence Gargiulo and I were chatting last week about the role storytelling plays for leaders and we agreed that the leadership-storytelling triple-threat was the ability to elicit stories, tell stories and trigger stories. When we say trigger stories we mean that a leader does something that's remarkable so people tell the story of what happened. So on this theme I was tickled pink to receive this video from Victoria Ward. A terrific example of a leader triggering stories.

Day 5 of Story Week

Fri, 08 May 2009 12:26:48 +1100

So its Friday and here we are at the end of Story Week. Many thanks to all of you who contributed and here is our final story - something serious...