partum intelligendo

The Narrate website

As is obvious, the Narrate website is currently suffering from a self-induced episode of colour- and image-allergies.  We've been moving servers etc for mail and in the process upset the mambo content management system that fuels the website.  

Truth to tell, the mambo system had become more hassle than it was worth so we were already looking at a complete re-design of the website.  We've therefore decided that for the time being we're not going to devote our energy into repairing it.  This blog, indeed, probably serves as a better introduction to the work we've been doing recently than the website - things move quickly around here.

Apologies to everyone who has visited the website recently and been frustrated by the text there.

The Merger - Introduction

Part of my time this year is being spent as an adviser to two organisations that are merging.  I realised that it will make an interesting example to blog about it as I'm going along with the process - and material to reflect on later in the year.

So there's a new category to the blog - Merger process - into which I'll chuck all the relevant posts as I go along.  But let's bring you up to speed first.

The story so far

About a year ago, as a result of a pending change in leadership, an organisation that I've been working with for a few years started examining options for the future.  I'm on an advisory-style board, so much of the discussion took place at that level (or more accurately within sub-groups of the board) - with little communication to the (small-ish) workforce at that point, beyond that there would be a change in leadership and more news would follow later.

After exploring some options, there was a general consensus to take a fairly innovative new approach - to merge with another similar but larger organisation and share leadership for a trial period to explore a fully-fledged merger later on.

Thus began the start of discussions and negotiations between board, leadership and select local stakeholders.  Mostly focussed on terms and conditions, fallback and monitoring plans for the trial period, and high-level organisational structure.  I suspect that in this it is much like the high-level negotiations of most mergers.

For the staff, we arranged for them to meet the new leadership and appointed from within to find a deputy leader in the old organisation.  But only did those after we concluded most other negotiations - so this was late in the day compared to when we'd started high-level conversations.  (Driven in part by everyone's high respect for the old leader and wanting to let them finish without interference by the new team.)

Day One of the new, joint organisation was yesterday, Wednesday 1st September 2010.

We brought together the new joint workforce (who will for the most part continue to operate on separate sites and, as yet, will be largely independent of each other).  They'd met briefly earlier in the Summer - an event which had started to create linkages, but had also exacerbated certain concerns.

My organisation, that had instigated the merger, is about a third of the size of the other in almost all measures - staff, budgets, etc.  There was, therefore, a sense of "being taken over" - not necessarily the case, but an easy pattern to fall into.

So yesterday, we ran eight simultaneous The Future, Backwards sessions in the new organisation.  We kept people in groups with others like them, maximising the difference between the groups, as we wanted to ensure the end results reflected as many different perspectives as possible.  So we had groups for the new Leadership team, the advisory boards for each (old) organisation, different staff groups from the old organisation (but never mixing the old organisations).

The end results of that process were much of what I'd hoped for: 

• People seeing the driving factors and events from organisations' pasts - and hence understanding how and why others saw current events as they did
• A shared sense of future possibilities - and pitfalls and potential disasters
• A greater sense of a single organisation, within which there was room for diversity

What fascinated me were some of the comments I overheard later:

"You can see why they feel more concerned about all of this - we're much bigger.  We need to bear that in mind - they'll need more of the leadership time to help them through."

There was no hint of judgment or good/bad opinion in the conversations, just "clean" realisation of another viewpoint and what had driven it to that point.

After we'd viewed all the Future Backwards models, we regrouped everyone around functional roles and departments to start thinking a little about where to go next and what arose from the work thus far.  As ever, I reached a little further than was realistic - people were so tired from the earlier work that we called that to a halt early.

But not before one group had started to play to come up with a new (informal) name for the joint organisation and not before every group had started to gel in ways they hadn't managed before.

It's early in the process - and late, in some ways - but it's an encouraging start.  I'll blog more as time goes by and we get to the next stages, but it's been a powerful way to start the process of bringing two organisations together without territory fights and power posturing.

Information is to behaviour change as spaghetti is to a brick

The title of this post comes from Wilbert E. Fordyce, who worked with people in chronic pain. It fascinates me that professionals who work in life and death fields understand (and get frustrated by) the fact that when people need to change their behaviour to save their lives, it's not enough to tell them why. Even when told of the dire consequences of their continuing current behaviours and given clear information on exactly what to change and how, they still continue in old patterns of behaviour. And, for instance in the case of heart attack patients, when the consequences should be enough to focus their minds completely.

So. Life-threatening consequences, the "burning platform" that Bill Quirke talks about as a pre-requisite to change, clear instructions on what to do and how, along with pictures of both positive and negative outcomes of change/not-change. And people don't.

Doctors understand this, despite it being peripheral in many ways to their specialisation - they are, after all, paid to know about things other than how to communicate. Communicators, whose professional status is often bound up entirely in this, rarely do. There are still plenty of communicators who will sit back and try to craft the perfect change message time and again, despite plenty of evidence that it just doesn't work like that.

I despair sometimes, even more so when I read the responses to Liam's recent post.

Late edit: it seems the comments on Liam's blog aren't visible. So here's a link to another blog that attracted a lot of comments about Liam's original post.

Making sense of thousands of stories, suggestions or complaints

Stories are fabulous things, but there's one thing about them that makes them a real bugger to work with. They're big, wordy and take time to read.  And if you've got loads of them (or indeed anything over a couple of dozen) it's well-nigh impossible to see patterns in them or analyse them. Once I'd got past the initial hurdle of how to generate (or more accurately collect) stories in an organisation, this was the show-stopper in early Narrate projects.

So, when I was in Washington a little while ago and caught one of the new (and sadly not re-commissioned) TV series, I had to laugh at the ease with which they brushed past "the difficult bit." The show was FlashForward and revolves around everyone on the planet having a vision of themselves at a set point in the future. And then the fun starts... The maverick investigators (naturally) then build a website called Mosaic - into which everyone can enter the stories of their visions, and then the investigators can pick up the patterns and matches in these millions of stories.

If all you have are raw stories, that's a near impossibility. There are technology companies that will tell you they can do semantic or textual analysis - but they are deeply flawed at best. There are human analysts who can read a sample and tell you what the teller meant, but as I found out when I did that early in Narrate's evolution, that only gives you the analyst's interpretation of the individual story (often very different from the teller's meaning) and you get any number of cognitive biases kicking in, so that you miss stories that show you important but rare information, you get blinded by what you expect to see, etc, etc.

Thankfully, we're now past that point. In the past two years, we've run a number of major projects using Cognitive Edge's SenseMaker™* software - collecting raw stories (in their badly spelled, ungrammatical, sometimes garbled or terse forms) but with the tellers adding meaning to their stories by showing us what they see in their stories. They use shapes to show us the meaning like these triads (taken from two recent projects, one was to understand sales issues in a multinational, the other was the international pilot for a proposed global cultural/anthropological collection of stories from all cultures):

People just mark the triangles to indicate how they see what was going on in the story. Simple and quick.

It means we keep the teller's original meaning attached to the story, but we also get something even more useful - a way of analysing the mass of stories. Because when you have collected lots of stories, you can look at a single triangle and see where they're all placed. The triads below are the results from the triads above, with each story represented by a dot. (The left-hand triad, Customer emotions, has almost 1200 stories in it (one per dot), but we can see where the stories are and see where the main beliefs fall. The right-hand triad, Justice, also has the dots colour-coded to show what stories people thought were positive and what stories they thought negative.)

So finally we get to see the overall patterns from thousands of stories (or customer reports or suggestions or any other form of qualitative input) - and see how the original tellers see the world. But throughout, we've got the original stories tucked away beneath each dot, so we can, for instance, look at all the stories in that little cluster in the centre of the triad on the right. There are twenty:

You can see on the left of the box all of the titles of the twenty stories - including multiple ones about the same thing. And on the right of the box you can see the text for the story that's been selected - "El Oso Sonador"

So, finally, we have a tool that is exceptional at showing us the patterns that emerge from masses of qualitative data like stories. And then allows us to zoom in on particular areas of interest to see what stories or material drive that area. Given how easy and cheap it is now to generate stories in volume (via all sorts of collection techniques - worth a later blog on its own), this then becomes great at seeing the overall picture and sifting the important and useful material out of the mass.

For anyone gathering large amounts of material from audiences - be they customers, employees, residents - it's invaluable to add a little extra on the input side, but be able to do fast and accurate analysis on the back end.

*By way of full disclosure - we're part of the Cognitive Edge network of practitioners and therefore licensed to use and sell SenseMaker™.

Being smart doesn't mean you're willing to be wrong - even when you are

A great little story and point from Lorimer Moseley's Body in Mind blog: Does vertebroplasty for osteoporosis-related fractures work

In short:

Clear scientific trials (rigorously done with sham interventions mimicking all but the one crucial element of a real intervention) has shown that a particular treatment was no better than a pretend treatment. The results were presented back to a highly-intelligent audience, who then interrogated the results and the method. And some began to search for the reasons why the research was flawed and why their preconceptions still held.

My favourite phrase from Lorimer is:

Some of the room were observing it all and with open minds voiced that even here, amongst the keener, more learned, more expert clinicians in the country, showing that it doesn’t work, doesn’t work;

There's a part of me that wants to know, in that case, what does work - but the truth of course is that what works in one place won't in another.

But it makes me reflect on much of the work we've done in the past couple of years using SenseMaker and other research methods - sometimes the results come back and tell clients that long-held beliefs are wrong. And it's easy for the results (and the project and our credibility) to be thrown out at that point - it happened on some of the early projects. Increasingly, therefore, the project needs more touchpoints and communication with clients, so that they undertake the journey of exploration with us - meaning that there are moments early on when entrenched beliefs are lightly questioned, when the possibility of alternative options is raised, when those options start to gain ground, etc. A single final presentation (with all the tempting showmanship of "Ta-Daa!" as you throw open the curtains to display your fabulous results) is a sure way to get the results dismissed - and you with them.

The ideal, of course, would be that clients use SenseMaker themselves to explore the results and reach their own conclusions, but that's still a step further than we've managed so far. The talk is always there, but the reality is another matter...

Conference talks and awards

I'll be in London next week for the KMUK 2010 conference on Tuesday.  Capped with the KMUK Awards, where I've been shortlisted for Best Presentation.  It's flattering to be on the list with people like Dave Snowden, Bonnie Cheuk, Oz Benamram and Nick Davies.  (I'm hoping to catch something of Oz or Nick at some point, neither of whom I know.)

The presentation from last year's event is here.  Title's dry and it's high on visual, so it's a good thing Kathryn Chin was kind enough to record it -

Retaining essential business capital presentation - part 1

Retaining essential business capital presentation - part 2

Retaining essential business capital presentation - part 3

Retaining essential business capital presentation - part 4

I also promised the LGComms 2010 crowd that I'd put up the presentation I gave recently:

Narrative in communications

Coffee and conversation in Washington DC

I'm in Washington DC next week, arriving Sunday 2nd, leaving Sunday 9th seeing various people about mapping narratives. There are some breathing spaces to catch up with people, if anyone's up for a coffee.

And, looking ahead, I'm in Geneva later in the year and Amsterdam next month. Same applies.

Informatology 2010

Spent today at the Informatology conference at Russell Square today - some great conversations and presentations.

As part of the Leadership session, I spoke briefly, then we ran a 45 minute anecdote circle - some great stories coming out of it. Thanks to all who joined in!

I promised I'd put my slides ( Download 001 Narrative in leadership) on "Leading with Stories"; the ebook on Mythology, Leaders and Leadership ( Download Mythology, leaders and leadership - Narrate on leadership). I didn't mention it, but for Leadership, I'd also recommend the HBR article that Dave Snowden and Mary E Boone did: "Leader's Framework for Decision Making", available here. It's a fabulous and straightforward introduction to important concepts about complexity in organisations.

The European story collecting tour

A great day yesterday spent with the full Narrate team, David, Ron, Ruth, Meg, Anne and myself.

In addition to thinking about the future and other projects, potential and real, we spent half the day reviewing our latest project - collecting a couple of hundred stories from employees in 11 cities in six countries in two weeks, using SenseMaker and signifying (see upcoming blog post for explanations) to get a couple of thousand perspectives on the stories.

All to see how a particular group of people see their world, what messages are needed and potential interventions to improve the company's results in the most practical, bottom-line way possible - increased sales!

The results were great - really useful insights into the population, coupled with stories to exemplify and share the challenges and solutions. And, best yet, it's all being fed straight into the comms and planning processes to make a real difference.

So yesterday was a comprehensive session on what had worked, what hadn't, sharing experiences (some of us worked more in some countries than others), along with (where appropriate) notes for what we might do differently next time. And of course general relief that no volcanoes erupted in those two weeks...

And I was also rather keen on the European tour t-shirts we made up for the team too!

The corporate memory-makers

An interesting, if slightly underdone, article in today's FT: Management - The corporate memory-makers.

Some interesting points in it - the idea of using oral histories is of course a good one. (Given that I'm running another workshop on how to do them in-house on 18th February with Melcrum, I would say that.) And the idea of using retirees and frontline staff - of course both these groups tend to have informal fora to tell stories anyway - a good example being the intranet website set up by the tech-savvy young helpline staff at IBM in the 1990s, that gave them space to share all the bizarre calls they'd get looking for PC help.

What's less emphasised in the article is the learning available (it gets a mention in the last part of the article, but quickly passed over). Those same IBM call centre staff would learn from the shared stories - new techniques to deal with callers, quirks of the technology, etc - along with the shared sense of belonging it generated.

The best way I've so far discovered to collect this material is Anecdote Circles (free how-to guide from Cognitive Edge here)

And, beyond gathering material and stories, we've found they have multiple uses:

• Generating new understanding
  We ran a series of anecdote circles with a UK government department around the idea of leadership and while the focus was on collecting material for the communications and development teams, many of those involved went away enthused with new understanding of what leadership might entail.
• Closing projects
  It's mentioned in the last paragraph of the FT article, but it can be a fabulous thing to wrap projects up, particularly when combined with a celebration. Far better and healthier than the traditional lessons learned exercises (which tend to be the same as previous lessons learned)
• Starting projects
  Another element, perversely, is to run one as part of the project startup phase. This way, the team can get a good assessment of each other, what their previous experience is (as well as how they perceive the world) and potentially spot future obstacles. (We've all had the experience of sitting three months into a project at a blockage and someone piping up "this happened on the last one too - what we did was...") Better to get that at the start than halfway through.

The difficulty, surprising to many people, is what you do with the material afterwards - it's possible to generate hundreds of stories in a short space of time. Listening or watching or reading them all would be impossible from a time perspective, but more importantly would be futile as we'd dismiss many and become so entrained, we'd miss the relevant ones.

It's been the thing we've struggled with at Narrate in the past decade - what do you do with a mass of stories - but having worked on projects in the past year with Cognitive Edge and their SenseMaker suite, we're now working on some exciting - and highly valuable - interactive projects. More on that later this week.

The Mathom of Destiny

Merry Christmas to everyone celebrating and here's to a fabulous 2010. 2009 has been an exciting ride - made so much better by the people I've worked with this year.

Here's the story I wrote to put into cards a couple of years ago, and below it links to a couple of different versions of my favourite Christmas song. (Sentimental in its own way, but with a different twist.)

The Mathom of Destiny

T

he Spear of Destiny was finally, irrevocably, lost because the Mahmouds’ battered lemon yellow Renault 2CV disappeared beneath the wheels of a lorry on the N10 just south of Bordeaux. Professor Mahmoud had come into possession of an ancient Roman spear some years before. He was unaware, and only lately suspecting, its true provenance.

When relatives finally embarked on dividing up the family spoils of the Mahmouds’ Evesham cottage, its warmth had dissipated and the ever-present emptiness had stagnated into loneliness. They were in brisk mode – sort, divide and discard.

The heavy iron point on which overdue water bills and credit card statements were impaled went unnoticed, as was the weathered wooden staff holding up the washing line between the azaleas and the chrysanthemums.

The spearhead, at least, survived – some lingering sense of value was enough to keep it from the council’s bin lorry, but never quite enough to give it a lasting home. For a few years, it surfed the swell of family relationships, moving each time Christmas or a birthday arose. Lives were somehow never overtly different, just more content in its wake.

But, eventually, it had passed through everyone’s hands at least once and it moved beyond the bounds of the Mahmoud family. Having moved to a small village in Bedfordshire, it now passes regularly around – the vicar, the postman, Mrs O’Grady, occasionally pausing in the charity shop.

The wooden staff, of course, was another story.

And for the musical accompaniment I suggest here and here