partum intelligendo

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

Nicotine as a workplace lubricant

I regularly bring it up at seminars and in Q&As, but now the FT's on the case:

Little research has been done on smoking in the workplace. Much of what there is focuses on how smoking bans encourage people to quit, or how non-smokers resent smokers leaving their desks for a puff (surely less of a legitimate gripe when so many people waste time surfing the internet without leaving their desks).

But I have not been able to track down any research on one of the most striking aspects of workplace smoking groups: their heterogeneous make-up. Companies spend money on activities such as Outward Bound adventures and cookery classes, hoping to encourage bonding between different departments. Smokers already cross those boundaries. Look at any group congregating for a cigarette: you will see senior executives and security guards, marketing and IT support.

Does smoking produce business benefits? “There’s no doubt in my mind that it inspires cross-departmental collaboration,” one FT commercial manager (and smoker) told me. “You get to know people who you otherwise wouldn’t, and get a feel for what they do. If you’ve half a spark of creativity about you you’ll doubtless stumble across an idea you hadn’t thought of before. It also allows for the ‘off the record’ conversations between departments that grease the wheels of business. I’d be pretty lost without them.”

The best time to smoke at work was probably from late 80s, when it became unacceptable to smoke at your desk, to the early 2000s, when you had to smoke outside the building rather than in the smoking room. Like so many well-intentioned "effectiveness measures" like coffee machines instead of tea trolleys, organisations have succeeded in breaking many of the social rituals and meeting places and instead are wondering why the coherence in the organisation is less strong than it once was - and they're having to encourage people to try online social media to collaborate instead. And employee engagement programmes to try and reinstate some sense of cohesion.

Admitting to difficult choices

A recent conversation came round to an interesting communications point. A really important one, although it looks a bit pedantic:

We rarely choose to own the difficult choices that come out of a difficult environment. And in communications, we blame external factors. It's perfectly natural, but it gives everyone else a reason to dodge owning a decision. You know the sort of thing:

"Because of the recession/economic conditions/new legislation, we have to make some changes/redundancies..."

Or whatever language your organisation uses.

So what we're saying is no-one at the top of the organisation had a choice - or at least none are willing to own up to having to make one.

Hardly leadership is it?

Instead, I think we need to talk about the overall environment - the recession, etc - lay out the consequences of doing nothing, the best viable options and then someone - presumably the leader - says "It's a tough decision that I wish I hadn't had to make, but the alternative was worse. So I've decided to do xxxx."

Because there was a decision made - as a friend put it recently, it may be a choice between standing in four feet of s**t or standing in six feet of s**t, but it was a choice.

Because if the leader blames external factors for difficult decisions, why can't everyone?

Employee engagement

Satire and ridicule is a great way to damage rumours/stories/beliefs (Robert McKee talked about Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles" putting paid to the old western genre until Clint Eastwood came up with "Unforgiven" to give it a gritty twist from the old versions.)

So I'm delighted to see Dilbert putting the boot into the fluffery that is Employee Engagement.

While I like the idea of employees being engaged, let's be realistic - and less managerial. I'm not engaged in my business all the time - and I own and run it. Nobody can be. And if this is truly about employees, why is it always proposed by someone else? I wrote some years ago about Employee Engagement, like Loyalty before it, as an inherently flawed concept. Engagement and loyalty require an exchange - of trust, of communication, of many things - and yet these programmes are traditionally more about the organisation engineering a response from its employees without engaging itself in the requisite exchange.

The dictionary definition of engagement is sixfold:

1. a pledge of marriage, a betrothal;
2. an appointment or arrangement, esp. for business or social purposes;
3. the act of engaging or condition of being engaged;
4. a promise, obligation, or other condition that binds;
5. a period of employment, esp. a limited period;
6. an action; battle

Be honest, which of those is yours?

Leeds Castle Leadership - the communications piece

Thanks to everyone at the Leeds Castle leadership event today - an whistle-stop challenge on communications, with an abbreviated Anecdote Circle thrown in. At the break a few of us were talking about The Future, Backwards and, naturally, I recommended Gary Klein's Sources of Power.

The slides are Download 001 Putting public in the picture.

Story seminar in London

It's obviously the time of year for seminars, etc. I'm giving three in the next week, but coming up on 19th-22nd November in London is Robert McKee's Story seminar (details here).

He is the expert on screenwriting and story for fiction/entertainment - and always useful for anyone dealing with narrative. His book Story is excellent, but the seminars are something else again.

A couple of years ago I did his one-day Comedy workshop, which included plenty of theory and a piece by piece dissection of A Fish Called Wanda that, unlike most dissections of popular culture, enhanced my enjoyment thereafter, rather than destroyed it.

The death of storytelling? Overstated

I know this was meant as a provocation, but I do get provoked quite easily, I'll admit.

When I first started exploring and experimenting with using stories in organisations, I loved the idea of carefully-crafted, fully-formed stories. (I had, after all, come from public relations where the skill to craft a coherent, grammatically- and politically-correct story was a pre-requisite of any job.) The temptation was to look down on those who couldn't come up with a story with a neat story or character arc, clear protagonists, other characters, etc.

The exceptions tended to be for the outputs of emotional audit exercises - stories created in tightened timescales by individuals to illuminate current patterns of belief. At that point, I valued more the content than the structure - how generous of me!

Since then, of course, I've moved increasingly away from the fixed idea of a story having to be so neatly defined. In fact, I distrust neat stories implicitly now, except in fiction. Too many organisations produce neat stories that are often, by virtue of their very neatness, not trustworthy.

And that's just the first element of why stories and storytelling are not being killed - they shouldn't be as neat and defined and structured as people like Ben think.

And if we decide that they don't have to be so clean and careful, it becomes possible to have them in all sorts of ways. Because Twitter and Facebook and all the other internet tools that are derided for eroding our attention span are creating stories all the time. They're just not on the page or on the screen - they're creating patterns and narratives in our brains. The cumulative effect of all of, say, Ron Donaldson, Dana Leeson, Dave Snowden or David Quantick's individual twitters create an overall story (with lots of mini-incidents) that is just as powerful a story, just not so succinctly told.

The point is that they are still stories - but in the mass, not in individual chunks. (There are, of course, exceptions: "machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time" being a personal favourite from Alan Moore.

A new indicator of regional sophistication

I offer these, after my fascinating drive into work this morning:

Regional shortsightedness: the proportion of cars driving in fog without their lights on

Regional stupidity: the proportion of silver/grey (i.e. fog-coloured) cars driving in fog without their lights on

Story timelines

From the xkcd.com blog, I loved this image, particularly the 12 Angry Men.

And, for added geekery, can you spot whether the Lord of the Rings timeline is from the books or the film?

Upcoming training course

The next masterclass on storytelling that we're doing with Melcrum is fast approaching on 17th November 2009 in Central London.  Details and registration are here.

I'm also speaking next week at the Leeds Castle Leadership programme for local government.  These will be the last two public speaking engagements this year.  I've got a couple of planned sessions in January and will post details of those shortly, but I'm not now taking any more until February.

For those interested, I've got the slides and MP3s for the talk at KCUK 2009 earlier this year, where I talked about "Retaining business capital" - a long-winded and jargon-laden way of talking about sharing experiences and knowledge.

The slides are here: Download 001 Retaining essential business capital and the audio - in four pieces - is here: Tony Quinlan part 1

Tony Quinlan part 2

Tony Quinlan part 3

Tony Quinlan part 4

(Thanks for the recording go to Kathryn Chin - the excellent now-freelance conference organiser. Tweet/thank her at kat_mandu_)