partum intelligendo

The end of the world is not nigh

For anyone that's hung around long enough in groups that verge towards what's often termed "New Age" or "Alternative" (or, sometimes deservedly, "Fluffy Bunnydom"), the year 2012 becomes familiar. As the date of the End of the World according to the Mayan calendar - and, usually, as the convergence of all sorts of other events that, when taken together, give added justification to the date as being the end.

And it's about to get added familiarity with the upcoming gloriously over the top Hollywood blockbuster called, lest there be any doubt, 2012.

As most people who know me know, I've dabbled in these areas - and found useful tools in many - but become disillusioned in some of the philosophies and metaphysics behind them.

So it's with a degree of pleasure that I spotted this this morning: a Mayan elder who's getting fed up answering questions about 2012 because it's just not that significant. I particularly love the comment from Jose Huchim, a Yucatan Mayan archaeologist, "We have real concerns these days, like rain."

Playing with SenseMakerTM

On Monday this week, I spent the day with four smart people playing with Cognitive Edge's SenseMaker software and a collection of just over 1500 stories. What was most encouraging was that, up to that point, most of us had used it and looked at material and wondered why we didn't get it, when everybody else did.

Having been at the core of the project and therefore having a reasonable understanding of how/why the signifiers had been chosen meant that I had the context to look for meaningful patterns in the many stories.

It's a phenomenally powerful tool, and I realise that for future projects I'm going to budget a lot more time for looking through material. There are so many ways to look at the stories and see how they inter-relate and how different elements and qualities interact that it could wrap me up for days as I strive to find the one magic answer...

...which of course doesn't exist.

It taps into an old pattern of thinking/concern for me - that what I'm not looking at is more important than what I am looking at. That I'm missing something crucial. (On a bad day, that extends into "that crucial bit I'm missing invalidates everything I am looking at")

Some of the benefits of Monday - having a bunch of us looking at the same material, coming up with answers and thinking through what they meant (and sometimes they didn't mean anything) were:

1. Feeling less stupid as it became apparent we were all getting something from using SenseMakerTM, but none of us felt we were getting as much as we should
2. Coming up with a rough process to start analysing new sets of data/material as they come in
3. Knowing some strategies to see the major results quickly and then being able to check for specific pieces

All in all, a very positive experience of a great tool. And I feel less of a chump than when I started...

Random stories or last.fm?

There's an increasing trend I've noticed recently among people looking at stories - to take a brief look at stories to find the ones that "typify" the organisation.  And, because of the perception of storywork being highly resource-intensive, it's generally a very small number of stories that are used.

Somewhat akin to the periodic iPod randomizer memes that crop up (the latest being here) - fun to see what comes up, but from such a small sample it's impossible to tell what's actually the dominant taste.

For example, my five random songs this morning were:

Beachcomber Voodoo by Julee Cruise (The Art of Being a Girl)
Haunted House by Leon Redbone (On the Track)
Better Be Home Soon by Crowded House (Farewell to the World)
Somebody Told Me by The Killers (Hot Fuss)
Losing My Religion by REM (Precious Rarities)

And it would be very easy to see patterns and make assumptions about my musical taste from that.  Even more so if, by chance, an artist were repeated.

Yet a better way of seeing the bigger picture is to look at Last.fm (my profile is here) which builds up a cumulative picture from thousands of pieces.

Similarly, it's more accurate to look at larger volumes of stories and pick out patterns than it is from taking a small sample of stories from within the organisation.  And, despite the assumptions, it doesn't have to be either difficult or expensive - it's relatively straightforward to build systems that gather and collect story material in volume and to be able to see the patterns that emerge. Software like SenseMaker^TM make it very simple to look at thousands of story fragments quickly.

From those patterns, it might be possible to see specific stories that dominate a culture, but they'll be far fewer and not necessarily the ones that come out of a simple sample of a few hundred stories...

MESH is a mess, but Apple is a huge temptation

I've recently come across two outstanding examples of customer service - in many ways elements that should be simple business-as-usual, but because of the rarity of such common sense practices they stand out in my mind.  And, as direct results of those processes, the companies in question have won substantial new business from me.

(These are particularly notable in the wake of two spectacularly bad pieces of customer service - step forward MESH Computers and SEAT cars.)

The first example is my mobile phone provider, 3.  Early in the last contract, there were problems with 3 - billing and technical problems that made me re-think the decision to switch to them.  They resolved the technical issues quickly - "here's a new, more up-to-date phone that'll work better.  No charge." - which left the billing problems.

We'd come in on a special tariff that was difficult to implement in their billing systems.  No-one was debating the tariff or trying to move us, but for two months, we were over-charged.  Then, on the next customer services call, the agent made this response:  "It's difficult to see that this hiccup won't repeat later and I don't want that.  Can I make this suggestion?  We put you, for billing purposes only, on tariff XXX, which would mean £X over the course of the contract.  But our agreed tariff would mean only £Y over the course of the contract, so we'll credit you the difference into your account immediately, so that a) you only pay the agreed amount of the contract and b) no more billing problems and customer service calls.  There is a c) you don't have to pay us anything until that credit is used up - so nothing to pay at all for another X months..."

I'm impressed.  A system that genuinely puts the customer first is a rarity.  As are people trained to think round the system and the problem to come up with a solution.  And managers willing to let processes be circumvented openly.

Needless to say, when it came time for renewal I did.  And subsequently gone for their mobile broadband too.

The second example is an easy one, but still significant.  After fighting for almost 10 months with MESH Computers to get a functional Windows PC, I looked again at Apple.  Yes, the products look well-designed.  Yes, there are people who are utter evangelists for the company.  Yes, they say they can do most things.

But how do I get convinced to a point where I'm ready to throw out a decade of investment in Windows kit, software, habits, etc.

The website's good and checking through I discover that there's an AppleStore half an hour from here and that I can book a one-hour business consultation to talk things through with them.  Not bad.

Before the session, I get a friendly phone call - what am I looking at?  What are my concerns?  I talk through my main ones - the stuff that I do on my systems that's slightly quirky but helps keep me running.  Programmes like Easy2Sync for Outlook.  Come the meeting, Steve's got answers ready, along with healthy advice ("You don't need the top of the range laptop, just go with this model.")

I'm pretty much sold - the products are good and I'm impressed with the service I'm getting.  (With the constant proviso that this is pre-sale, and things often change afterwards...)

And then comes ProCare.  Apple's top of the line service offering - drop the machine in and we'll sort it at the Genius Bar.  (Given that MESH's helpline and seven booked engineer call-outs haven't fixed the current PC, I like this.)  And, let us have your current PC and we'll transfer everything across for you...

And the "let us have the machine for 24 hours once a year and we'll give it the once over, tune it up, etc" is just a dream come true.

You mean you'll give me the product, help me with training (Apple's One-to-One), easy service (which may turn out to be more run-of-the-mill disappointment like others, but nothing about Apple has disappointed so far) and then once a year you'll take it off me and repair everything I've tweaked or uninstalled by accident.

I'm shifting to Mac.

For me these two companies have one thing in common - they genuinely see the customer and have chosen to understand the customer from the customer's own perspective.  They've then amended their processes and offerings to make life simpler for the customer.

Horror stories for the Mac? Anyone?

After enduring some spectacularly bad hardware problems and appalling customer service with my current desktop PC, I'm finally looking at moving over to Mac.  It's exciting and tempting, and I'm (at last!) realising that those are also warning signs.

As with most things, we tend to confirmation bias - seeing evidence to support the course of action we want to take.  So this time, I'm looking consciously for reasons not to move to the Mac, specifically for examples of system failures and lack of service in resolving issues.

It's an interesting exercise.  Had I done it for the desktop PC, there were plenty of horror stories available to make me reconsider.  For Apples, however, there are fewer.

So - I'm pleased I'm actually thinking it through more and looking for warning signs.  Anyone got any horror stories?

Undiverse diversity

In recent weeks I've spoken at or run workshops at conferences on knowledge management, employee engagement and change communications.  Very few moments in those that excited, but one over-riding element that depresses me.

The subtext of so many of the questions I get asked and so many presentations I sit through is "How do we get everyone thinking the same way?"

STOP IT!

At a purely practical level, organisations are legally required to have gender, race and age diversity - disparate types of people working for them.  What on earth makes you think they'll think the same when their experiences, perceptions of the world and cultures are different?

At a strategic, health-of-the-organisation level, everybody thinking the same is positively dangerous - stifling innovation, suppressing warning signals, locking out possible alternative ways of seeing the world.

You don't really want everyone thinking the same, parrotting the corporate messages back at you (even if they believed them, which they don't).  You want instead to learn ways of working with that diversity of opinion, voice and approach.

Is the Tipping Point Toast?

In the last couple of years, there's been a lot of interest in social networks - and (somewhat belatedly) communications professionals are starting to look at greater use of informal networks and word-of-mouth.  There's still, however, the temptation to look at the model Malcolm Gladwell sets up in The Tipping Point as one where certain people (Gladwell calls them Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen) have a strong effect on the rest of the world.

For communicators, it's very seductive - if we can just discover who these people are, we can focus our efforts on them and allow the network to take care of the rest...

Earlier this year, however, Duncan Watts studied the problem more rigorously and discovered that it doesn't actually work that way.  He created a model of a social network - a virtual environment where he could adjust how strong the connections were between people, how much more influence some had than others, etc.  Fast Company reported on the article in Is the Tipping Point Toast? 

The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

Why didn't the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn't they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend's success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend--not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone's odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.

For communications/engagement/PR this has really important implications.  As, I think, it does for leaders.  The individual (no matter how much influence they have) has less effect than the readiness of everyone else to hear the message.

"If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts's terminology, an "accidental Influential."

Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That's because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. "And nobody," Watts says wryly, "will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire."

So, communicators can (and do) spend lots of time crafting the right message.  Or training the leader to communicate better.  Or identifying the right vehicle or channel for communication.  All of which are roughly equivalent to getting a really neat spark together.

Instead, if you really want to ignite change, prepare the ground.  Raise awareness of the problems, shift the environment, stimulate the conversations.  And through these, stimulate the social network, don't analyse it.  Because, in traditional complex vs complicated terms, you'll spot the influential in retrospect and expect them to take that role next time.

As Watts points out, viral thinkers analyze trends after they've broken out. "They start with an existing trend, like Hush Puppies, and they go backward until they've identified the people who did it first, and then they go, 'Okay, these are the Influentials!'" But who's to say those aren't just Watts's accidental Influentials, random smokers who walked, unwittingly, into a dry forest? East Village hipsters were wearing lots of cool things in the fall of 1994. But, as Watts wondered, why did only Hush Puppies take off? Why didn't their other clothing choices reach a tipping point too?

So for communicators, or culture change agents, it's better to invest in two other areas altogether - preparing the ground and trying lots of sparks.  Some will die out, but then some will catch in ways that you can't predict.  And that unpredictability is, I suspect, why few comms teams are so far willing to go this route.

What do I do?

At a closed doors conference recently, I got asked many times, "Great title. But what do you do?"
The truth is that, although my title is Chief Storyteller, I've long since stopped working with people to tell better stories. Stories and narrative techniques are still part of the toolbox but only occasionally the end result.
I realise the question may be another consequence of the categorising instinct. The question behind the question is often "What box can I put you in?"
And our work doesn't fit in the standard boxes.
At heart it's about helping people see alternative ways of thinking about their world. Seeing other perspectives. Reaching real common understandings. Breaking out of entrained patterns.
Which still doesn't answer the question. I like that.
I spent a lot of time in narrate's early years with advisers insistent on boxing it up, usually around limited ideas of culture and communications. Yet in the last 18 months we've done projects around branding, leadership, HR, visioning and strategy.
Time to drop the boxes altogether...

Newton vs free will

From Scarlett Thomas' The End of Mr Y:

"Newtonian cause and effect suggested that someone wound the original clock and set it ticking, and that every single action in the universe could be predicted - if you had something powerful enough to do the prediction.  There's no free will in that world: a world where everything can potentially be known.  In that world, I'll get up in the morning and do what I have been programmed to do: as though all my actions are just computer-game dominoes, triggered by other computer-game dominoes.  It's what happens when you try to combine God and science.  It's narrative, pure and simple.  There's a beginning, a middle and an end. And the middle is only there because the beginning is; the end is only there because the middle is.  And in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.

Take away that cause-and-effect narrative and you have the quantum world, disturbing enough in its own way, with all the possibilities of multiple universes and infinite probability.  But if you don't take it too seriously, and if you factor in evolution and economics, and everything else that's taken for granted in our world, then you have at least the illusion of free will."

Patience that produces common sense

Last week, as part of a visioning/future planning exercise for local education, I ran a Future Backwards exercise with Year 4 - a group of 8-9 year-olds.  It reinforced the power of the exercise - but also that if you create the conditions for discussion, allow time for that to happen and wait for things to emerge, they will.

To the horror of some of the adults around (a visiting party of headteachers who couldn't help themselves but interrupt and offer inappropriate judgments until they were herded away), initial thoughts ranged from "a big swimming pool for the boys and a little one for the girls - and the boys one is filled with jelly" to "lady teachers with big boobies".  After a while it moved through "but that's too much play - we want to have some lessons" onto real, useful thoughts and concepts.

Much the same concern often crops up in other organisations, particularly those with faintly (or strongly) paternalistic views of their staff.  "We can't let them just talk about anything, they'll get so negative/unrealistic/etc"

Patience, a simple setup and permission to be negative/unrealistic will, in short order, create useful emergent ideas.