partum intelligendo

Moving from robustness to resilience – new Risk and Resilience video available from Cognitive Edge

Firstly - thank you to Harold and apologies to others: the link to the slides that I posted on Friday didn't work. It's fixed now, so they're accessible from Capturing an organisation's narrative.pdf (3573.9K).

There's an excellent new video up at Cognitive Edge's website and on their YouTube channel:

Today Cognitive Edge is happy to present a short video introducing the importance of organisations making strategic moves from systems built around principles of robustness, to systems that are built on the principle of resilience.

Traditional management has tended to focus on developing robust systems which try to prevent failure. However, in light of increasing interconnectedness of events and the complexity this introduces, the ability for systems to plan for the avoidance of all foreseeable incidents has become limited.

In this video from Cognitive Edge, called Risk and Resilience, Dave Snowden highlights the strategic importance for organisations to refocus on the creation of resilient systems. Whereas robust systems try to avoid failure, and become crippled in the event of it, resilient systems accept that failure is inevitable and move from focusing on prevention to focusing on early detection of events and fast recovery from them.

This video can be found in our Videos section. You may also follow this link to all the Cognitive Edge videos on YouTube, for our previously released videos on Introducing SenseMaker®, How to Organise a Children's Party, and the Cynefin Framework, amongst others.

Details of Dave's regular one-day seminars entitled "Leading Through Complexity" can be found here.

[From Moving from robustness to resilience – new Risk and Resilience video available from Cognitive Edge]

Resilience is a topic I've been thinking on recently - and there's a blogpost due on exactly that shortly. (But there are a couple of projects that need attention first...)

CASE presentation materials

Yesterday afternoon was another interesting presentation - this time to the CASE group of internal communicators from Higher Education. Smart people, fun afternoon and just to add to the mix, I got to speak with Ghassan Kharian of Kharian and Box, who I haven't seen in a while. Following his presentation was a challenge...

I promised to post a number of things here:

My presentation slides: Capturing an organisation's narrative.pdf (3573.9K)

Links to the method papers for Anecdote circles and The Future Backwards at the Cognitive Edge website

For people starting to explore using story in communications, this post might be a good place to start.

The problem with employee surveys - the right answer or the true answer?

Here's an interesting question - are you assuming that because people tell you the right answer that they believe in it?

I ask, because I'm looking at some interesting employee responses to a recent survey. With a colleague, we changed the usual response format from 1-7 Likert scales of "How engaged do you feel on a scale of 1-7?" to a combinations of triads and polarities going from one extreme to another. (See this previous post for the background.)

What's been interesting is the comments coming back from people appended to the end of the survey. A fair number of people have come back saying "I wasn't sure what the right answer was in this format, I hope I've got it right." It raises some interesting issues:

• Did we make it too confusing?
  Possibly - the new format wasn't explained in advance and the only instruction was "Please put a mark on the triangle to show where your answer is". The questions themselves and the language on the triads were commonplace and straightforward. More explanation or a chance to do it on a trivial example first might have helped.
• Was there a right answer anyway?
  Nope - we were asking which area(s) people thought the organisation was particularly good at. We were genuinely wanting to know what people thought - we had suspicions, but wanted their reactions.
• Why were they looking for the right answer?
  This is the crunch question, for my money.

Why were employees looking for the right answer in an employee survey?

It's a natural thing to spot the answer people are looking for in surveys - we do it pretty much unconsciously. You know if you're given a range of answers for a number that you discount numbers that don't fit the majority pattern and that you tend to go for the mid-point of a range. You know if you're given a standard scale of Bad-to-Good, people are looking for answers at the Good end of the scale. And the human instinct (unless you're a maverick or in a bad mood) is to "gift" the answer within your comfort zone. (So, you'll tend to the Good end of the scale, but you may not be comfortable giving 10, so you'll go 8 or 9.)

But to find people concerned about finding - and giving - the right answer seems to indicate a culture where it is more important to understand and replay the language - conforming to what they think the organisation expects. It's evident, too, in the actual answers - particularly because there is one triad where the "right" answer is evident, but people who have developed a pattern of putting there mark in the centre of a triangle (i.e. not being willing to commit to any particular strength, but taking the non-commital approach) put their mark in the centre because they've got used to that.*

It does, however, make me wonder about all the standard employee surveys - are they actually testing for compliance and the ability to feedback what the company has said to them? I have a horrible feeling that that's increasingly the case.

*The upshot is that this putting-it-in-the-centre-all-the-time could be useful. By possibly including one triangle where the answer is evident (and where the centre is inappropriate in most cases), we'll be able to check and filter out sets of responses where that easy default option has been taken.

A new approach to corporate culture - scrap the values statements

This time last week I was in Brussels, talking about internal communications - and made the point I always do about the problem with corporate values. They don't work. There's no context, they're generally meaningless (who's ever going to argue with them) and they're too easy to twist around.

This week, Dave picks up on the topic coincidentally - and offers more structure to my comments last week. Stories - parables even - and archetypes is a better route. (It's a topic I'm picking up at the moment with some colleagues working on a global culture change project - instead of going for the standard approach of "The Future is Blue and Round, so let's give everyone paint brushes, pots of paint and sandpaper and measure their progress towards Blue and Round" they're going with "Let's look for where there are some brilliant success stories, share them and have people work out how to come up with ways to create stories like that where they are. Blue and Round is our general intention, but along the way we may find out that Indigo has more going for it and that Ovoid is more flexible.")

[That metaphor needs work. Lots of it.]

Pithy comments from Dave's post as he sowed, some fell by the wayside are here:

Aside from the fact that I have yet to see a set of organisational values that were not a set of well meaning platitudes, all you are really doing is teaching the politically manipulative the language of power.

...it doesn't follow that I don't think we shouldn't articulate values, but we need to do so in a way that carries with it necessary ambiguity so that the statements can adapt to context, and also so that their form allows for verification of actions, not just linguistic form.

The point here is that a story carries context with it, as well as the ability to create resonance. Critically it allows for ethical validation; saying that action X was consistent with a mission statement is easy, matching it against a story is far more difficult.

So what form could this take? Lets summarise a few:

• Parables are the basic method in the New Testament to convey complex ethical principles
• Fables are a long standing type of parable, but using animal proxies.
• Archetypal stories and characters represent complex learning and cultural statements in most societies. Anthropologies use the archetypes present in traditional stories to understand the culture of the society from which they have emerged; and they do emerge over time they are not created. One of the most used methods I ever created was archetype extraction, something we teach on the accreditation courses and which is more fully described here. The method also provides something more substantial than persona for software design by the way.

Cognitive Edge European Network meeting - Hamburg, Monday 16th May 2011

A reminder - it's only 11 days until the next Cognitive Edge European network meeting.

As ever, anyone who's done the Cognitive Edge practitioner training is welcome - and the focus is on the practice, not the theory. Conversations are organic, not planned, although there are usually some elements planned in advance.

This one is in Hamburg, hosted by Christoph Schlegl, running from 1100 to 1600.

The venue is:

Die Akademie für Führungskräfte der Wirtschaft
Alte Rabenstraße 1
20148 Hamburg
Germany

The venue is easily accessible by public transport from the airport (fare €2.80, time ~ 50 minutes)

Lunch is a mere stone's throw away at a great restaurant with a fab lake view.

More details will, no doubt, follow in due course.

There’s a Google map for the location at:

http://maps.google.de/maps?q=Alte+Rabenstraße+1+20148+Hamburg+

To register, so that Christoph knows numbers, please head for Eventbrite.

That Innovative Internal Communications workshop - the slides, the reading and the video

Friday was an odd start - I'm used to catching the 0430 train to St Pancras for an early Eurostar. I'm also used to clubbers getting off the train on their wasted way home as I get on on my equally wobbly way to work. What I'm not used to was whole families getting on trains that early in the morning with camping chairs, picnics, etc. It was, of course, the Royal Wedding that day and they were off to find their spot from which to view all the ceremonials...

I, however, left the country.

I was running a workshop in Brussels for European Commission colleagues on Innovative Internal Communications. And I promised, as always, to put up various things afterwards here.

The slides are here: Download 002 Internal comms masterclass - initial slides.pdf (4519.5K)

The basketball video can be reached via here: basketball video

The promised reading list is here: Download 006 Narrate recommended reading list.pdf (84.9K)

There were a handful of other publications I took that aren't on the standard list: John Kotter's Our Iceberg is Melting; Steve Farber's The Radical Leap; Robert Bolton's People Skills; Chip and Dan Heath's Made To Stick and a couple of back copies of ECO.