anecdote.com.au

How do you organise your stories?

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:35:15 +1100

I didn't realise it at the time but when we started this blog back in 2004 we were creating a type of story bank where we could go back and retrieve great stories to tell. Recently we have made this more accessible with Story Finder. We have an even more sophisticated system we use internally that allows us to manage the many stories we collect with our clients.

So I'm facinated how people manage their stories and enjoyed this short clip from a documentary about Joan Rivers on how she keeps track of all her jokes. I'm so happy we started in a digital age and don't have to maintain a card catalogue. Love to hear how you organise your stories, if you do.

Thanks to @makingstories for the link to the Joan Rivers clip

Putting stories to work is more than storytelling

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 18:33:31 +1100

Telling, telling, telling ... So many in the field of story work focus on storytelling. Sure, telling a good story at the right time has impact. But storytelling represents a mere fraction of what can be done with business stories.

Here is one little example.

Last year I had a call from Kirstyn. She works in HR for a large engineering firm. Kirstyn runs a program for their graduate employees to build their skills over three years. This firm has some or the world's engineering and scientific experts and the graduate employees get the opportunity to work shoulder to shoulder with these experts on some amazing projects. The thing is, the graduates often don't make the most of it because they rarely get to hear what these experts have actually done in their careers. Why? Because they graduates are unskilled in asking story-eliciting questions.

So we set about helping about 40 graduate employees learn how to elicit stories from their expert colleagues. And after learning the basics we wheeled in some senior experts as guinea pigs to practice with. It was a great way to practice their new story-listening skills but more importantly it was an opportunity to get to know some of the more senior folk in the firm.

And because we know that people remember what they feel we asked Melbourne Playback Theatre to perform some of the stories the experts shared with the graduates.

Here is one of the stories.

Clare (not her real name) was obviously a driven woman. She was in her mid-forties and had the figure of a marathon runner. Her black hair matched her black outfit. She started her story by telling her graduates that she experienced a turning point in her career because of one particular nightmare project. She was performing a quality assurance role on an engineering project and the client didn't like her. In fact they were hurling abuse at her but she kept telling herself that she was tough and could take it. With every insult she worked harder.

One weekend she decided to visit her parents in the country. As she was walking down the hall of her parents' house she could see her mother's silhouette at the end of the hallway. As she emerged into the light her Mum turn around to see her gaunt and exhausted daughter. All her Mum could say was, "Oh honey, something needs to change." and she gave her daughter a big hug. At that point Clare decided to get balance in her life and get far away from unhealthy work environments.

You could hear a pin drop as the graduates heard Clare tell this story and their jaws dropped when Melbourne Playback Theatre performed the story for everyone.

Benjamin Franklin and deliberate practice

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:53:00 +1100

Thomas Jefferson was a great believer in luck, and he found that the harder he worked the luckier he got. His friend and fellow signatory of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin, shared this belief in hard work and self development. From a remarkably young age Franklin understood the importance of practice. Not the kind you get knocking a tennis ball around with friends. But that drilled, repetitive practice of hitting the same shot over and over again. Benjamin, however, didn't have his eye on Wimbledon (actually it's kind of a temporal impossibility), rather his ambition was to be a man of letters.

When most young teenagers were skiving off with friends, Ben was enjoying debates with his dear and similarly bookish friend John Collins. Around the age of 14 one of their debates spilled over into a flurry of letters they sent back and forth to each other on the topic of whether women should be educated. Ben's father found the letters and read them. He didn't comment on the content but critiqued Ben's style. He felt his son was a first class logician. His arguments were well reasoned and his spelling was top notch. But he lacked elegance in expression and could improve his method and clarity. Ben accepted his father's assessment and set about improving himself.As it happened Ben stumbled across a volume of The Spectator, a daily publication produced from 1711-12. Ben loved it and thought the writing was excellent. It was the perfect model to learn with to improve his writing.

He started by taking one of the essays and jotting down a note for each sentence indicating the sentiment it contained. He then put his notes aside for a few days and then by using his notes recreated the essay in his own words. Then he compared his version to the original and made corrections. Essay by essay he could see his approach improving his skills and in some small ways he felt his expression might even be better than the original. These glimmers of erudition gave him hope.

Despite the progress Ben felt he needed more. He wanted to expand his vocabulary. What better way then than to rewrite an essay's prose in verse. Again he would start with notes expressing the sentiment of each sentence but this time he wrote his version in verse. It forced him to add variety and creativity. After a few days he'd forget the original prose and so would then take his verse and use it to rewrite the essay. Again he made a comparison, made corrections and learned by doing.

The Anecdote blog is all about how leaders can return humanity to the workplace and the vital role stories play. I get a little tired of leaders who hear about the value of storytelling and then tell me they don't have the time to learn how to do it. The fact is it takes practice to be good at anything. Some estimate 10,000 hours of practice. But it is not just any type of practice. You need to engage in deliberate practice just like Ben Franklin did to be world the renowned writer and communicator he became.

Terrence Gargiulo and I and going to share some of our ideas about storytelling deliberate practice in a webinar next week. Please feel free to come along and join our conversation.

We're doing this webinar twice, one timed for Asia Pacific and the other for the Americas. Just click on the link of the webinar you want to attend and fill in your details.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM Aust. EST

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM USA PDT

The story about Ben Franklin comes from his autobiography. You can read the whole thing on Google Books.

Organisational Development Australia (ODA) Annual Conference in a couple of weeks

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 09:28:00 +1100

I'm looking forward to heading down to the Novatel on the Upper Esplanade in St Kilda for the annual ODA retreat. It all happens on the 24-25 August. I believe there are still some places to be had.

I'll be presenting a couple of sessions on using narrative techniques to support change initiatives. Lots of interesting sessions to attend. I'm looking forward to hanging out there for the two days and dinner and enjoying some excellent conversations.

Here's the website where you can get the details to register etc. Very reasonably priced.

Stories or just the facts?

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 08:31:28 +1100

Bob Dickman, who wrote Elements of Persausion, just sent me this note that has this thought provoking story in it which I though you would like. If you are in California you might like to attend his storytelling workshop.

I've just returned from visiting some friends of mine in Maui. They told me an amazing story.
800 miles off the Hawaiian coast, an oil tanker caught on fire, and the blaze moved so quickly that the captain didn’t have time to radio for help. Fortunately an American cruise ship was nearby, and the entire crew was rescued. But as the cruise ship began sailing away, someone heard barking coming from the tanker. The tanker's captain realized that his dog, a small brown and white terrier named Hokget, had been left on board. When the cruise reached port, passengers immediately alerted the Humane Society about the missing dog. Soon the news media was winging the story all around the world, and checks began pouring in. One check was for $5,000. Public pressure was so great that the US Navy and Coast Guard sent ships and planes to find Hokget. Eventually he was rescued alive and returned safely to Hawaii. It has been estimated that millions of dollars were spent in recovering that one little terrier.

What happened? Why did this dog capture the imagination and resources of all these people? After all, we live in a world where millions of children (as well as countless dogs and cats) go hungry every day. This little terrier had a name and his plight was told as a story rather than a statistic. People responded because they felt something immediate and visceral. They were moved to take action. Statistics and abstractions don’t make people act, stories do.

When facts and emotion combine to produce a story, people will act. Facts alone are too distant and cold. They produce indifference.

Are you differentiating yourself from your competition using facts alone? What stories are you telling about your business? Are they abstract and distant, or do they engage people and get them excited about your new business ideas, products and services?

Come to the August 21st workshop with author and master storyteller Bob Dickman. Work on your story in a positive, engaging and creative environment. Practice and improve your story making abilities. Turn indifference into action.

There are four spaces left for the August Workshop.

Thanks,
Bob

Clarity Rules

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 09:05:05 +1100

My friend Greg Stewart is putting his blogging efforts at Clarity Rules behind a movement he cares deeply about: the pursuit of clarity.

His manifesto is simple:

There is a great movement afoot, and I want to help:

Tribes have been started by the likes of Garr Reynolds of Presentation Zen, Nancy Duarte of Slide:ology, Dan Roam, Barbara Minto, Chip and Dan Heath and many others, and more and more, their work is having an effect on all of us:

We are improving the way we think and present.

Clarity Rules is a call to arms in support of this growing movement.

Its goal is to spread this good thinking. To be another voice insisting that clarity is an absolute necessity. To unpick tangled thinking. To smooth out waffle. To kill off bad presenting altogether. I want Clarity Rules to be a place where everyone can come and share their stories of clarity winning over obscurity, and to make sense of how it can be done.

I want use this blog to assemble everyone's great ideas and techniques into a series of Clarity Rules we can all share and use.

So let me add some stories and some ideas for better clarity.

Yesterday I blogged about Richard Branson and his simple story to launch Virgin Money. That’s clarity.

A couple of weekends ago my daughter attended a presentation to help her pass her Japanese exams with 1,000 other Victorian students. The presenter read their slides for 90 minutes. That lacks clarity.

But then the presenter switched gears and had two past students role play a good and bad Japanese exam interview. That’s clarity.

Consultants using big words to make them sound more important and intelligent with gems such as transformational leadership, team-based solutions, re-engineered synergy, enhanced competence and retrospective coherence. That lacks clarity.

One of the reasons why these abstract concepts are lost on us is that we don’t have the real life experiences or stories of others’ experience to make sense of them. They are labels without an anchor.

So here is my clarity rule: when introducing a concept that your audience might unfamiliar with, illustrate the idea with a story to ground it and make it concrete.

Greg’s blog is in my must read RSS list because I’m constantly on the lookout for ways to be a better communicator. Plus he’s a friend. We're never short of something to gas bag about.

Richard Branson launches Virgin Money in Australia with a simple story

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 12:19:56 +1100

Last week I was driving to basketball with my daughter listening to Hamish and Andy on the radio. Richard Branson was up next to talk about the launch of Virgin Money and this is what he said (perhaps not word perfect but how I remember it):

Andy: so tell us about this new venture Sir Richard

Sir Richard: Until recently Australia had nine banks but the big four gobbled up the smaller ones leaving Australian with little choice and higher fees. Virgin Money has arrived to give Australians a choice again.

That night I was watching the 7pm Project and there was Richard telling the same simple story.

I can see this little story having an impact for three reasons:

it's told as a story where the little guy is up against the four big, bad guys (we like a challenge story)
it reminds us of how Branson introduced Virgin Blue and how flight costs tumbled
it's a story so can be easily remembered and retold

Have you heard other CEOs launch products or a company with a story/

Book Review: The Power of Positive Deviance

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:28:50 +1100

I have just finished The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems by Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin and Monique Sternin) a book I have been waiting for some time to come out. I am very glad to say the wait has been well worth it.

Positive deviance has received a lot of attention since the concept was laid out in a series of articles way back in 2000 – one in the Harvard Business Review and the other in Fast Company. The concept has recently received a new boost since it was covered in both Influencer: the Power to Change Anything and by Chip and Dan Heath (where they called them ‘bright spots’) in Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.

How to stop executives becoming grammar nazis when defining their purpose

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 11:29:30 +1100

In our work to help organisations make their strategies stick we often start by helping the executives get clear on their purpose. Why does their enterprise exist? If you have facilitated these types of sessions you probably seen this happen a million times: the group circles in on the essence of what's important and then suddenly they get bogged down nit picking words and trying to incorporate every possibility. In large organisation each executive wants to ensure their part of the business is included in the purpose statement and if you let this happen you end up with mush.

Here's what I do which makes a big difference. Just when they start to get bogged down I call a time out and ask them to watch this video.

From that point on everyone refers back to the Dan's messages and pull each other up when they start acting like a 10th grade school teacher and we move along at pace.

Here is an example of a purpose statement we helped deliver from the Transport Accident Commission: "A future where every journey is a safe one."

It's interesting to note that Dan uses a story to get his message across and clever use of animated graphics.

The origins of Earth hour

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 01:10:07 +1100

Earth Hour has been held annually since 2007, in late March. In that first year, Earth Hour focussed on getting one city, Sydney, to switch off its lights for 60 minutes. In 2010, over 1 billion people participated in 128 countries and over 4000 cities. Where did this global phenomenon originate? What forces were arrayed to make it happen?

I hadn't thought much about those questions until last night, when Shawn and I were at a conference dinner and heard Todd Sampson (of the Gruen Transfer fame...oh yeah, he has also climbed Mt Everest solo) talk about creativity. Todd described how, in 2006, he met with five other people in the Hilton hotel in Sydney. The group wanted to tackle a big question: how do you change people's behaviour for the benefit of the planet without using fear? The answer they came up with… Earth Hour. The World Wildlife Fund got behind the initiative, people's imaginations were ignited and the rest is history.

We are always on the lookout for little things that make a big difference. Earth Hour shows us that we can switch off our lights. Time to start making some beeswax candles in preparation for the next Earth Hour which will be held at 8.30pm 26 March 2011.

It's a Marathon - Not Magic - New Webinar

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 12:12:33 +1100

Last year Terrence Gargiulo and I delivered a webinar in the triple threat of storytelling. It was really popular and we had a great time doing it.

Well we're back for another webinar, this time we're exploring how to become a better storyteller by applying some specific and deliberate practices.

Here is our little marketing blurb. Sign up details are at the bottom of this post.

Have you wondered why you are not making better progress at becoming a storyteller at work? Are you finding it difficult to find good stories to tell? Are your stories relevant to your colleagues or do they look at you blankly wondering what planet you're on?

Spend 45 minutes with master business story practitioners Shawn Callahan of Anecdote and Terrence Gargiulo of MAKINGSTORIES.net as they share deliberate practices you can employ today to be a better storyteller.

We will conduct the session as a conversation involving everyone. Yippee!

We expect you'll walk away with three things from this session:

Three practices to deepen your storytelling skills
Ideas from other attendees of how they improve their skills or what works for them...what works in their organisation
Some specific resources for finding good stories

We're doing this webinar twice, one timed for Asia Pacific and the other for the Americas. Just click on the link of the webinar you want to attend and fill in your details.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM Aust. EST

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM USA PDT

Looking forward to chatting with you on the call.

Anecdote.com is live

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:37:26 +1100

When we started Anecdote in 2004 our web presence consisted entirely of this blog. We gradually built content, and a following, but every now and then people would say, "we really love your blog but what exactly do you do?" So for some time now we've been planning a website that described our consulting work.

So it is with quite a bit of excitement that this week we launch www.anecdote.com.

In the coming weeks you will also see a refresh of the blog. It looks a little tired next to the new website.

Love to know what you think.

How to get your story heard at work

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:36:28 +1100

In a fast paced workplace dominated by tasked focussed folk hell bent on ticking boxes and creating outputs, it can be difficult to get your story heard. The conversation can go something like this:

"OK, what's the next item on the agenda?"

The preceding conversation reminded Jean-Pierre of something they should really avoid that happened last year. "You know getting this job done really reminds me of what happened last year. Do you remember how Gary pulled together everyone from budget and wholesale and we had that crazy time creating the budget report?"

"We probably don't have time to reminisce. Trish, would you like to report your planned next actions."

There's a misconception that stories must be long-winded and don't add much value to a "business" conversation. Of course the very opposite is true. We've listed a few reasons on why stories are important to business but in this case stories provide concrete examples of what to do or what to avoid. Examples that people could put into practice. But before they will listen to your story they need to answer a couple of questions in the positive: is it relevant? is it plausible?

With these requirements in mind, here are 4 tips to get your story heard at work.

Preface your story with a relevance statement (a sentence or two) that highlights why the group should listen. "We don't want to make the disastrous mistake Gary and the team made last year," should get people in the previous example interested in the story.
Keep your story short. You can say a lot in 90 seconds so you should aim for a story that's about that length.
Avoid the 's' word. Steer clear of the terms 'stories' and 'storytelling' because they trigger the wrong mindsets in your listeners, ie. probably made up, for entertainment, unbusinesslike. Instead talk about real life experiences, things that happened, case studies or just launch into the telling (after your relevance statement) with a time marker (which clearly implies you are telling a story anyway) such as last year, in 2007, last week, on Tuesday etc.
Or course your story hasn't really been heard until people reflect on what was said so finish your story with a question to get your listeners talking about the story. You might ask, "I wonder what we can learn from that experience?" or "What do you think are some of the significant lessons?"

Irene Pepperberg and Alex

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:14:01 +1100

In the 1970s Irene Pepperberg was studying for her PhD at Harvard in theoretical chemistry but wasn't really loving it. Then she learned about the interesting work that was happening in training animals to communicate with humans. People were working with chimps and dolphins and amazing strides were being made. She was hooked and threw in her chemistry studies and switched to working with animals,

She decided her animal of choice would be a parrot. You would train them to talk and they lived for a long time. So Irene got a Grey Parrot and called him ALEx, which stood for Avian Learning Experiment.

But the research community thought she was nuts. Parrots had small brains, the size of a walnut, and weren't parrots merely pets anyway. How could she be objective in her research? Getting funding was hard but she managed to get a one year grant to get started.

In the first 10 years Alex learned 50 labels for objects. He could tell if an object was one of 7 colours, up to 5 shapes, whether the shape was 2-6 cornered and what material is was made from, such as wood.

Irene would ask him questions and Alex would answer.

"Alex, what's this?"

And he would say, "block."

"Good birdie, and what colour?"

"Blue."

"Good boy, and what shape?"

"Four corners."

"And what matter?"

"Wood."

But despite the progress Irene struggled to get significant support for her work. Grants would come one year at a time rather than the 3-4 years that was normal. Her marriage broke down but she kept going with her research with Alex.

When Alex was 15 they were asked to do a BBC radio interview. By this stage Alex was developing quite a personality because he could now ask questions and interact with Irene.

To start the interview Irene was in a room with the radio host where Alex could not hear what was happening. She told the audience that she was holding an orange square piece of wood. And then the audience hears Irene's heels, click, click, click, as she walks into the room with Alex.

"Alex I'm going to ask you some questions, we are going to do some work." Irene shows the wooden square and says, "What colour?"

And in his little birdie voice Alex says, "No, you tell me what shape."

"OK Alex, it's four cornered. Tell me what colour."

"Tell me what matter," says Alex.

"OK Alex it's wood. Can you tell me what colour?"

"No, how many?"

"Alex, there is only one toy here. Alex, come on, what colour?"

"No, tell me what shape."

"OK Alex, time out, you are misbehaving," and you hear Irene's heels click, clicking as she starts to walk out the door, giving him a time out, and then comes a little birdie voice,

"I'm sorry ... come here ... orange."

Alex and Irene became famous in both the popular press and among her academic colleagues. They had achieved so much to show how animals can communicate with humans.

Sadly Alex died in 2001 aged 30, twenty years younger that what Irene expected and she was devastated. But she showed everyone that amazing things can be done with time, persistence and a parrot with the brain the size of a walnut.

I heard this story on The Moth podcast. You can hear it here.

Does your organisation have strategic clarity?

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 22:20:19 +1100

This evening I was reading Business Model Generation (thanks Tom Graves for sending me a copy). It's an approach for designing your business model and comparing it with others, such as your competitors. It is one of many approaches that illustrates the phenomenal effort that goes into developing business models and strategies. Yet despite all this strategic effort leaders often assume that everyone will just know and understand the strategy and their role in it.

Without strategic clarity, a clear understanding of the strategy that everyone knows, strategy development is a waste of time.

So here's a little test you can apply to your organisation. Don't be too alarmed if you fail many of the questions, many organisation do. But if you do, come and chat to us about strategic stories.

5 questions to test whether your organisation exhibits strategic clarity:

Can the executive team simply and clearly describe the strategy without referring to notes (or powerpoint slides) aided only by simple sketches they make themselves?
Does the executive team all believe in and describe the same strategy?
Do the decisions and actions leaders make confirm the strategy, especially what is said ‘no’ to?
Does everyone in the organisation knows the strategy and understands how their work supports it?
Does the organisation’s significant others understand the strategy (partners, clients, suppliers) and how they play a part?