anecdote.com.au

Origins - Asia Pacific Business Narrative Conference 2010 - Call for Case Studies

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:09:09 +1100

part of The Singapore International Storytelling Festival

6-8 September, Singapore

Call for Case Studies

In early 2009 we (Patrick Lambe and I) wanted to see if we could put together a conference on storytelling for business. Our concept was for a very practical, workshop-focused conference, designed to help Asia Pacific business people apply story approaches to boost business performance. But we weren’t sure if anyone would come!

So we organised a two-day masterclass on business narrative as part of The Singapore International Storytelling Festival, and the festival did a terrific job in telling people about the event. We waited anxiously to see if anyone would register. Did Asia Pacific organisations really value storytelling as a legitimate and effective business technique? Patrick called me in Melbourne a couple of weeks after we announced the event: registrations were coming in fast. We were booked out months in advance.

This year we want to build on that success and focus on the many story practitioners in our region to create an event where we can learn from each other while also expanding the awareness of narrative approaches among the region's organisations. We’re looking for proposals for case study presentations from within the Asia Pacific region to share what you have done and what you have learned.

The conference has three objectives

To build a network of practitioners to deepen the practice of storytelling and story use in organizations.
To create awareness of the broad utility of narrative techniques for dealing with business issues, their capacity to humanise the workplace, and to help organisations deal with complexity and uncertainty.
To inspire leaders to take the first steps in applying narrative techniques in their businesses.

Conference design

The event will have three parts:

Day 1 will be a closed practitioner's forum for the conference speakers and case study presenters only. We will spend the day sharing what we have learned from a practitioner's perspective. The day will be designed for dialogue rather than presentations.

Day 2 will be a public conference where practitioners will present case studies that illustrate the effectiveness of story-work; and

Day 3 will consist of a set of 1/2 day workshops to enable attendees to build their business story skills in specific areas such as coaching, organisational change, leadership development and communication.

Do you have a case study to share?

We are seeking expressions of interest to share a case study at the conference. We are particularly interested in stories of working with narrative in organizations, across private, public and non-profit sectors. They should clearly illustrate the value of how stories and storytelling can be used to meet the organisation's business needs.

Case presenters will:

Participate in the closed practitioners’ forum on 6 September
Share their case study in round table discussions in the morning of 7 September
Offer to share a technique they have successfully used in a “techniques marketplace” session in the afternoon of 7 September

How we will select the case studies

We will select case studies based on:

richness of the case for learning
transferability of the lessons
demonstrated impact
innovative approaches
geographic representation
representation of different kinds of organization

Please send a short description (a couple of paragraphs) to both Patrick Lambe (plambe@straitsknowledge.com) and Shawn Callahan (shawn@anecdote.com.au) before 22nd March. We’re also happy to trade ideas by email or Skype if you want to develop an idea before you decide to put a more formal description together.

Shawn Callahan

Patrick Lambe

Research shows that stories create personal motivation and increase productivity

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:46:47 +1100

The second Tuesday of every second month the Strathmore Unicorns Junior Basketball Club's committee meets. I'm the club Secretary and last Tuesday we were discussing the perennial topic of how to encourage our players (and their parents) to pay their registration fees on time.

Each year the Treasurer send a letter to laggards warning them that if they don't pay their fees they will not be insured and wont be able to play. This letter might have worked in the past but over the years coaches rarely stop their players from playing because of outstanding fees. So unless we become more draconian, the threatening letter approach has run its course.

As everyone was chatting I was recalling Influencer's six sources of influence and based on that model I suggested an alternative that appealed to personal and social motivation of an important person on every team: the team manager.

Here are my two suggestions. Love to hear yours in the comments.

Personal motivation initiative: we are creating a one-page handout describing why the team manager is an important role and listing four things every manager must do to be great at the job. The first on the list is to collect registration fees on time. I did think we should include a short story of how a manager did one of these tasks (more on this idea below).

Social motivation initiative: For the next four months we will share with all the team managers the overall percentage of teams that are all paid up and either congratulating them of getting all their fees in or encouraging to be as good as the rest. The overall percentage at the outset will be large which will send the message that most people are paying (social proof).

To add to this thinking I discovered this morning some important influence research which shows how stories can be added to this mix with tremendous effect. Over at the Inside Influence Report Noah Goldstein reports on Adam Grant's research showing that reminding people of the meaning and significance of their work can double their productivity. And he did this by simply sharing stories from those people who benefited from the call centre worker's hard work: in this case benefactors of a fundraising organisation.

Here is how Grant ran his experiment. Working in a fundraising organisation call centre, Grant divided his participants into three groups: people who were reminded of their personal benefits of the job; people reminded of the significance their tasks was having on the benefactors of their work; and the control group. The personal benefit group read stories from other employees about the benefits of the job such as money, skills and knowledge. The task significance group read stories from the people the organisation was giving scholarships to and how these scholarships effected their lives. The control group didn't hear any stories.

Here's how Golstein reports the results:

What they found was amazing. Employees in the Personal Benefit and Control conditions looked almost exactly the same after the intervention as before it in terms of amount of donation money raised and the number of pledges earned. Yet, those in the Task Significance condition earned more than twice the number of weekly pledges (from an average of 9 to an average of 23) and more than twice the amount of weekly donation money (from an average of $1,288 to an average of $3,130). Additional analyses suggest that the huge increase was driven by previously unmotivated employees increasing the number of calls they made per hour.

So my question is who's story does the team managers need to hear? I can't imagine hearing a story from the committee of how getting the money in on time will motivate anyone. Perhaps it needs to be a story from one of the players that received a scholarship or from a parent in the under eights who gets reduced fees to get them started. Or maybe it is a story from one of the coaches who all just received new coaches tops.

Grant, A. M. (2008). The significance of task significance: Job performance effects, relational mechanisms, and boundary conditions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93, 108-124.

The importance of management development

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:49:35 +1100

On Monday I ran a management development program for a NSW University. Our program relies on a 'pull' strategy to get participants to determine for themselves the things they need to work on to be better managers and leaders. Each program uses examples collected from within the organisation to help them notice the things that are most important to their people and also the patterns of behaviour embedded in their culture.

On Tuesday, Shawn sent a link for a YouTube clip of Tom Peters stressing how important it to to develop managers, especially first line managers, because of the enormous impact they have on performance and engagement of people.

For the same reason that Tom explains in the clip, managers have an enormous impact of the success, or otherwise, of any change initiative an organisation undertakes.

Endings are important for how we remember experiences

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:29:42 +1100

Daniel Kahneman, the founder of behavioural economics and winner of the Nobel prize in Economics, tell this story in a recent TED talk.

A friend was recently listening to a recording of a beautiful symphony and then at the end of the recording there was a terrible screeching noise. "It ruined the whole experience for me," he said.

Of course the screeching didn't ruin his whole experience because he had 20 minutes or so listening to a beautiful symphony. It did, however, ruin his memory of the experience.

Endings are important. Kahneman describes Dan Ariely research¹ on how people perceive pain when they have a colonoscopy.

Check out these two graphs Kahneman showed in his TED talk. They report two patients' experience of pain during a colonoscopy. The second patient clearly endured more pain over a longer period. Interestingly, when ask to report on their memory of the experience the second patient remembered it to be less painful than the first. Ariely's research concludes that people remember an experience based on what happens as the end, especially if it's trending in a direction (such as, to lower pain).

So it's important to focus on the end. We remember the whole in terms of what happens at the end. With the colonoscopy research they found that just leaving in the tube for longer and not wiggling around too much gave people a happier ending.

It's no coincidence then that a common plot structure is one where the story builds to a strong ending.

You can use this type of plot structure to plan and deliver a presentation so everyone remembers the experience. Of course a good memory of the event happens when the last thing you did is satisfying.

1. Ariely, D. 1998, 'Combining Experiences Over Time: The Effects of Duration, Intensity Changes and On-Line Measurements on Retrospective Pain Evaluations', Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, vol. 11, pp. 19-45.

It's how you recover when things fail that counts

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 14:32:44 +1100

Since we started Anecdote in 2004 our local Kwik Kopy in Coburg has printed most of our posters and workshop materials. Kelvin does a great job. Always high quality, delivered when we need it despite the outrageous time frames we sometimes impose.

That was the case up until this Wednesday. We'd created a high quality handbook to support our Influence Change workshop and I picked them up from Kelvin at 4.30pm ready for the next day. At about 6pm I open the box and my heart sunk. The workbooks looked shoddy. Some of the pages were in the wrong order and all of them had edges that weren't trimmed and aligned properly. Very unusual for Kelvin. And I needed them for 7.15am the next morning.

I called Kelvin. I could hear his concern in his voice and he came over to my house right away. He apologised, kept extremely calm and said he would set it right. He went back to his store a personally redid our handbooks and arrived back at my place at 10pm with a perfect set.

It's interesting how we often don't make a comment when someone provides a great service day in, day out but we really notice when someone recovers well when the chips are down.

So if you are anywhere near Coburg and need printing services I highly recommend Kelvin's Kwik Kopy shop. Here is his address and contact details.

Kwik Kopy Printing Centre Coburg

Kelvin Minerds

583 Sydney Road, Coburg, VIC 3058

Phone (03) 9354 5822

Strategy alignment and execution consultants: Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney Australia

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:12:51 +1100

Anecdote helps you harness the natural power of stories to bring your strategy to life. We help you tell your strategic story and then engage your employees in the strategic process so everyone has a hand in creating it. The result is a strategy everyone understands in concrete, specific terms where the level of commitment to its achievement is vastly increased.

We apply four specialties to bring your strategy to life.

Business Storytelling

Anecdote trains and coaches leaders to find and tell their stories to influence, persuade and communicate more effectively, and to provide a coherent path when times are turbulent.

Facilitating change

Anecdote facilitates complex change initiatives by balancing the nuts and bolts of what needs to be done with insight into what’s really going on and through engaging emotions to create a resolve among your people to take action.

Leadership and management development

Anecdote delivers leadership development programs that enable leaders to conclude for themselves the essential traits of a leader and starts them off on their own personal change journey and then act as a powerful model for employees.

Building collaborative workplaces

We help our clients be more effective and resilient through developing their capabilities to work collaboratively, in teams, in communities of people with shared interest and expertise, and across diverse networks.

NB: For our regular readers you might be wondering why we are explaining what we do in a blog post. We just wanted to make sure people could find our services around making strategies stick and our four speciality areas.

Business storytelling consultants: Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney Australia

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:10:02 +1100

We apply four specialties to bring your strategy to life.

Business Storytelling

Anecdote trains and coaches leaders to find and tell their stories to influence, persuade and communicate more effectively, and to provide a coherent path when times are turbulent.

Facilitating change

Leadership and management development

Building collaborative workplaces

Book review: Switch—How to Change Things When Change is Hard

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 10:34:05 +1100

It was going to be difficult to surpass their last book, Made to Stick, where they showed us that people wont pay attention unless our message is simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional and a story. And it was going to be even harder practising what they preached to make Switch stick. But I'm delighted to report that they've pulled it off and have created an engaging and useful work on how to change things when change is hard.

Switch is arranged around an analogy (immediately visual and sticky). When we are making a decision we're often torn between our rational, logical reasons and our emotional, intuitive feelings. Chip and Dan ask us to imagine an Elephant and its Rider (the mahout). The Rider represents the rational and logical. Tell the Rider what to do, provide a good argument and the Rider will do it. The Elephant, on the other hand, represents our emotions, our gut response. The Rider might like to avoid that hamburger and chips but there is very little the Rider can do if the Elephant really wants it (OK, so I'm telling you what happened last night). To complete their analogy they include the Path they are travelling along. If the Rider can direct the Elephant down a well prepared Path then there is a good chance for change. The Path might represent, for example, access to user friendly technology or effective office space design. Switch is arranged in three parts: Direct the Rider, Motivate the Elephant and Shape the Path.

On Saturday in 2000 ... In 1990 ... A doctor was asked ... Crystal Jones joined Teach for America in 2003 ... These are the first few words of the first four chapters and apart from the last chapter each starts with a story. And within each chapter are more stories. These stories are well chosen and illustrate the behaviours we need to adopt to effect change. The whole book is focussed on behaviours and rightly makes the point that change comes from changing people's behaviour. That's the level you need to take. A leader cannot afford to stay aloof. For change to occur they need to get into the detail as well as stay strategic.

As a business storyteller Switch is a treasure trove of stories to be retold in organisations. Last week I was running a strategy workshop and I wanted the group to identify a set of guiding principles for their organisation. So I told them the story of the Brazilian railway that was going broke and how Alexandre Behring and his CFO created four rules to guide everyone's spending behaviour to get them out of debt. I shared the rules with the participants and they knew exactly what I meant and were able to easily create their own guiding principles. Strategy execution is a change initiative and Chip and Dan advise us to script the critical moves.

Here is the structure of the book. Notice how each section is a pointer to behaviour.

Direct the Rider: Find the bright spots; Script the critical moves; Point to the destination

Motivate the Elephant: Find the feeling; Shrink the Change; Grow your people

Shape the Path: Tweak the environment; Build habits; Rally the herd

On page 58 we encounter our first clinic and I must admit I groaned slightly when I bumped into it. Getting me to do exercises while I'm reading is normally a pain. I was going to just skip the clinic but decided to have a read and the thing I noticed was that the repetition of the ideas in another context was really helping me to remember. I knew repetition is important but I guess the story approach sucked me in and reinforced it.

One the first things I check when I get a book like Switch is to see whether it is comprehensively referenced and what type of studies are being referred to (if any). Switch passed with flying colours. The endnotes are expansive and they share a swag of evidence for each point they make and often used the psychological experiments as stories rather than just presenting the facts.

Switch is a book that will be read by senior leaders. It's engaging, well written, funny in parts and insightful. If you're an change practitioner in an organisation I recommend you buy a handful of copies and give them to your leaders. In my experience they wont read it right away but then they'll jump on a flight and start and wont stop. At this point you'll not only have a supporter but someone who will compel your involvement. Malcolm Gladwell has served me well in the past and Switch is in the same league.

Some tips for capturing stories on video

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:13:22 +1100

A few nights ago I watch Changeling starring Angelina Jolie. It's directed by Clint Eastwood (has he ever directed a dud movie?) and I was fascinated by a short documentary we found in the DVD extras where Clint explained why he never calls out 'Action' when directing a scene. As an actor Clint found a director's call to 'Action' off putting. He was immediately reminded that he was an actor, acting and his performance suffered. Instead Clint calmly and quietly says things like, "OK, in your own time ..." or "when you are ready ..."

I'll add that advice to my repertoire of tips for getting people to tell their stories on video. I like to use my Flip Video to make rough and ready clips. Here are the seven things I keep in mind when filming:

Sit the person in front of plain background--you don't want to be distracted by what's behind the storyteller
Have light come in from the side (sit them next to a window) to give their face more depth. But not in direct sunlight.
Hold the camera as still as I can.
Start filming well before you ask the person to recount their experience and engage them in some idle chit chat. This gets them used to being filmed.
Keep the camera as close to my face as possible and tell the storyteller to tell me, not the camera, the story. Ask them to look me in the eye. With the camera close by it will look like they are looking at the camera.
Keep filming after they finish their story. You never know what they will say after they relax and then there is plenty of space to edit the ending.
Try to avoid making noise and nodding while they are telling their story (hard to do). Otherwise your sounds and movement also get captured.

Collaboration provides autonomy

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 07:54:16 +1100

Last week I started a new Making Strategies Stick project with a large IT company. The guys I'm working with are the technical sales folk and as we were working out their strategic story they mentioned that the passion that was once there for their products seemed to be waning among some of their technical specialists.

These guys work closely with the sales people. The way they work together, however, varies dramatically from being merely instructed by the sales people to do demonstrations of the product (they call this being demo dollies) to working collaboratively as peers with the sales people.

I asked whether those who showed a lack of passion were also the ones treated as demo dollies. Th answer was yes.

Dan Pink has done a good job in his latest book, Drive, to show that there are three important factors that affect our motivation: purpose, mastery and autonomy. It seems that in this case those treated as demo dollies were losing their autonomy (and also unable to apply their mastery) and were losing the spark for the product. Collaboration (where collaboration is when peers work together to tackle complex activities--see our paper), on the other hand, provided all three factors.

Another good reason to get serious about collaboration in your business.

Leaders should tell a story to explain why

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:52:17 +1100

On a recent trip to Canberra I was lining up to board the plane. Behind me was a young family. Their young son, probably four or five, was quizzing his dad.

The boy said: "Why are we in the line?"

"Because we are getting on the plane," his dad replied.

"Why are we getting on the plane?"

"Because we are visiting Grandma in Canberra.," says dad.

"Why are we visiting Grandma?"

"Because we love Grandma and she likes us to visit."

Our urge to know 'why' is deeply embedded in our psyche. From an early age we want to know the reason things happen. It helps us predict what might happen in the future and makes us feel safe.

The desire to know why doesn't diminish with age. If a CEO announces that the company is shifting direction to concentrate on customer service, everyone in the company will want to know why.

And if they haven't been told the story of how the shift came about, they will create their own story.

Imagine two colleagues chatting after the CEO announcement to focus on customer service.

"After all these years banging on about innovation, now it's customer service. What's that about?" says Paul

"Well, I heard the new chairman is a zealot for customer service and at his last position there was a dramatic improvement when they focussed on their customers. He must have twisted the CEO's arm," says David

"Good to know the CEO can think for himself," Paul chuckles rolling his eyes.

If leaders don't tell the story that explains important decisions then employees will use the best information they have to create their own story. At best this only confuses everyone and stalls action. At worse the new direction is actively undermined by the competing stories.

You might be thinking, "so do the senior leaders simply spin a story that's serves their purpose?" You could try but employees are too smart to believe a porky pie. It's in everyone's interest for the leaders to tell what really happen to prompt the change. There are two things someone hearing the story will ask themselves before they will really listen to what's being said: is it relevant? and, is it plausible? Fail these two tests and you may as well be telling the stationery cupboard. With something as important as a new strategic direction it's vital that all the leaders want and can tell this story.

We call this type of story a strategic story and we've been having fun helping some interesting companies find and tell their strategic story.

The people part of change

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:37:23 +1100

In late May 2009 I was invited to advise on change management on a big project in Sydney.

The client was a medium size logistics organisation with a history of poor performance, low staff engagement and sub-standard customer service. They were in the midst of something of a crisis. They had been directed to substantially down size, two recent reviews had condemned them for their inefficiency and appalling service and a recent reorganisation appeared to have made matters worse.

One of the first things I did was to talk with the senior leaders. The CEO explained that they had reorganised twice, reviewed and substantially modified all operating procedures and introduced new and more efficient technologies to support their work. And despite all that he explained with frustration, nothing had improved. Most of the staff were "hopeless" and he thought the best thing was to replace them all. He had introduced a compliance team to monitor staff adherence to the new rules and processes, but despite many staff being caught and punished, they hadn't improved.

I gently explained that there was no point changing structures, processes and technology if people continued to behave as they had in the past. They had neglected the people bit of their change agenda. I was mildly surprised when this explanation appeared to come as a revelation for them.

My surprise was short-lived as I observed the way they talked about their staff and behaved over the next few days. I wish this story had a happy ending. I also wish it were an isolated incident.

One public workshop this year: influencing change with stories

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 08:16:12 +1100

We often get asked whether we are running any public courses on our techniques but for the last couple of years we have reserved these courses for our clients.

But this February and March we are running one workshop on influencing change with stories in collaboration with Kevin Bishop, most recently the Royal Bank of Scotland's change manager in the UK.

If you would like to attend here are all the details.

We only have limited places so please let us know as soon as you can to secure a spot.

Keeping richness in our decision making

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:28:10 +1100

Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807–73) was a Swiss-born American zoologist and geologist who taught at Harvard. Imagine that you went to Louis Agassiz’s laboratory at Harvard as a student. Agassiz would place a small tin pan in front of you with a small fish and utter the stern requirement that you “should study it, but should on no account talk to any one concerning it, nor read anything related to fishes” (Cooper, 1987: 79) nor use any artificial aids like a magnifying glass until he gave you permission to do so. As one student said, “To my inquiry ‘What shall I do?’ he said in effect “Find out what you can without damaging the specimen; when I think you have done the work, I will question you” (Cooper, 1987: 82). Students kept telling Agassiz what they had found and Agassiz kept saying “That is not right.” This went on, typically, for 100 or more hours with the same now “loathsome” fish. Agassiz would keep asking “What is it like?,” “Do you see it yet?” and saying “You have not looked carefully” and “You have 2 eyes, 2 hands, and 1 fish” (Cooper, 1987: 81). Gradually, things would begin to change. One student replied to the professor’s query as to whether he had seen one of the most conspicuous features of the fish, the symmetrical sides with paired organs, “No I have not seen it yet, but I see how little I saw before.” Agassiz replied, “That is next best . . . now put away your fish, go home; perhaps you will be ready with a better answer in the morning. I will examine you before you look at the fish” (Cooper, 1987: 81; emphasis added). Another student reported the following experience: “I pushed my finger down its throat to feel how sharp the teeth were. I began to count the scales in the different rows, until I was convinced that that was nonsense. At last a happy thought struck me—I would draw the fish; and now with surprise I began to discover new features in the creature. Just then the Professor returned. ‘That is right,’ said he; ‘a pencil is one of the best eyes’” (Cooper, 1987: 81; emphasis added).

Agassiz (nicely told by Karl Weick on an article on richness) was acutely aware of the human propensity to name something, to categorise it, and then discover its properties vanish before our eyes. Once named we no longer need to attend to the details to work it out. As Weick points out, naming things is an essential action to coordinate activities. Unfortunately we lose detail in the process.

One way to keep richness in our understanding is to identify the stories that represent situations. We are currently working for a government agency helping them to create and tell their strategic story. They've identified seven strategic directions and in and of themselves are abstract ideas such as, achieve with our partners, be easy to deal with, nurture independence. These ideas only make sense when illustrated by an prototypical story.

References

Cooper, L. 1987, 'Louis Agassiz as a teacher', in CR Christensen (ed.), Teaching and the case method, Harvard Business School, Boston, pp. 79–82.

Weick, K.E. 2007, 'The Generative Properties of Richness', Academy of Management Journal, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 14–9.

HT to Tim Kannegieter for pointing me to the Weick paper.

The Mahout, the Elephant and the Path—an analogy for change

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:02:53 +1100

Dan and Chip Heath have a new book coming out (Feb) and they sent me a copy of the first chapter. The title is Switch and like their last best seller, Made to Stick, it promises to be a keeper. It's all about how to motivate people to change. The first chapter has left an indelible impression because of the strong image they conjured to explain what we need to consider to influence change: the Mahout (they call it The Rider), the Elephant and the Path.

Changing behaviour involves a struggle between our rational and well-reasoned thinking and our emotional urges. The mahout represents the rational and reasoned. If the mahout clearly understands where he needs to go he'll direct his charge that way.

The elephant represents emotional urges. While the elephant might be happy to go the way the mahout directs, if she decides to go another direction there is not a single thing the mahout can do about it.

The path represents anything that might impede or assist the mahout and the elephant to get to where they are going. You want the path to be as easy to follow as possible.

So how does this translate to a business setting? Imagine you're a leader of an organisation that's decided to compete on exemplary customer service. To engage the mahout you need a clear rationale describing why customer service is so important. You would find the research that shows the factors that influence customer service and illustrate to the mahout in everyone the concrete actions you want them to take. Engaging the Mahout, however, is the easy part and the one most organisations spend most of their time doing. The hard bit is the elephant.

Engaging the elephant, the emotion, will take action and stories about things that happened. You might start by telling some stories of customer service blunders to grab their attention. Here's one that happened to me recently. It's important you find stories from the organisation. Real life examples. Negative stories, however, often in themselves wont change behaviour, partly because people don't know exactly what they need to do to get it right. So you also need to find stories of great customer service from your company. We call them Gibson stories because William Gibson (the sci-fi writer) once said: "the future is already here; it's just unevenly distributed." You just need to find these stories that represent your company's future. Tell them. Get people to discuss them. Inspire that elephant.

After engaging the mahout and the elephant you need to pave the path and remove anything that's getting in the way of progress. This might be a rewards system that's encouraging the wrong behaviour. Or it might be an IT system that is unintegrated and hard for call centre staff to use slowing down their support for customers. There are a myriad of obstacles to remove from the path.

Don't forget, the Heath brothers were the authors of Made to Stick which dedicates a chapter to the power of stories. Chapter one is full of great stories. Some you might have already heard, such as the 424 gloves that save a company millions or the 100,000 lives saves by the Donald Berwick and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

The Heath brothers conclude the chapter by saying:

Whether the switch you seek is in your family, in your charity, in your organization, or in society at large, you’ll get there by making three things happen. You’ll direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant, and shape the Path.

Photo credit: goofball12