partum intelligendo

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.

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_)

Melcrum masterclass details

Details are finalised for the "Storytelling for audience engagement" masterclass with Melcrum.

The date is Thursday 29th January 2009, it'll be 9am-5pm and held at Broadway House, London, opposite St James' Park tube station.

More details here and you can register from the page.

Comments from previous sessions include:

Excellent course. Very relevant, very practical. I have
tools and techniques I can take back to work and use
straight away.

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...

Upcoming business breakfast on communications

Melcrum business breakfast

Date: February 21st, 2008
Venue: Brewery, Chiswell Street, London EC1Y 4SD
Time: 8.15am-11.15am
Cost: FREE attendance (exclusive only to Hub members)

Presentations from:

Mike Love

Communications Director, Major Programmes Executive, BT
speaking on ‘Helping leaders be more authentic’

Melcrum’s research shows that contrary to popular belief among many practitioners, CEOs care passionately about internal communication and are quite clear about the benefits of being persuasive and effective communicators – that’s usually how they got to the top!

But they’re also aware that with trust in traditional authority figures dwindling, and widespread scepticism for anything that smacks of “spin”, now more than ever internal messages need to be delivered with authenticity and sincerity. How can communicators apply their coaching, drafting and crafting skills to help deliver messages that deliver on this growing internal demand for authenticity?

---

 

Bill Quirke

Resident Hub expert,
Managing Director, Synopsis Communication Consulting Ltd.
speaking on ‘How can communicators mobilize management?’

The CEO is frequently viewed as the clear and recognizable figurehead of major multinationals. It’s hardly surprising then that professional communicators make use of the CEO whenever possible. However what many CEOs say they want is for their senior management to play their part, and to step up to their own communication responsibilities.   

Communicators have to engage their senior managers in the job of communicating, and coach and equip them to do it well.   

Drawing on Synopsis’ recent work with global leadership teams in AstraZeneca R&D, Bill Quirke will discuss how communicators can engage leaders in their roles, help them understand their impact, and coach them to be more effective.

---

 

Tony Quinlan

Chief Storyteller, Narrate
speaking on ‘How to use narrative and stories to create effective engagement, feedback and change tools’

As narrative and stories become more effective tools in all forms of communication, Tony Quinlan, founder and Chief Storyteller of Narrate, demonstrates how they can be used to create effective engagement, feedback and change tools. With a dash of theory, some interactive exercises and plenty of practical examples, this will be a session to challenge your preconceptions about communication.

 

More information from coralie.thomson@melcrum.com

Change requires innovative, intelligent and energetic practitioners

How highly do you rate changing your organisation?

It's a topic that I've been thinking on recently because of what appears to be an increasing trend of making change/leadership/innovation teams the province of either short-term appointments or steady-as-she-goes staff.  Bright and challenging staff seem to be getting appointed to day-to-day operational roles.

While I think it's encouraging that organisations think this way, I'm deeply concerned about the quality of people in change teams particularly.  Every team works best with a balance of talents and skills - as the original Belbin model recognised, without boxing people into single roles.

Change and leadership - in current thinking - demand new ways of approaching problems, new ways of acting and the imagination and faith to try new techniques without being able to predict the final outcomes precisely.  While it's always good to have some detail people and some completer/finishers, the drive has to come from other types - innovators, intelligentsia, people willing to try new perspectives.

There are, of course, exceptions, but look at your change team (or yourself, if you're leading change).  How strong is the tendency to follow established processes?  To take calculated risks?  To be imaginative?  To keep your head down? To need to keep control over every element?

 

Technorati Tags: Culture change,risk

Boxing up complex concepts

Tomorrow should see the publication of Melcrum's Practitioner's Guide to Employee Engagement - in which I've contributed the chapter on using stories and narrative.  It's been an interesting experience - having abandoned the attempt to fit a gallon into a pintpot early on, I aimed instead to convey the complexity (sic) and excitement of the issue and some hints of different approaches - only the readers can judge my success.

I also wanted to avoid too strong a focus on "storytelling" - as I say in the introduction to the chapter

Storytelling is a misnomer. It conjures up the image of a passive audience sitting listening to someone with the charismatic, persuasive power to entrance them. It revolves around a carefully-constructed story designed to carry you out of the day-to-day to somewhere else and change your thinking while you’re there.

What is on offer here is more powerful and more positive than that simplistic view. And while it involves storytelling throughout, some of the greatest opportunities for employee engagement lie in listening to stories, not telling.

The real power and opportunity for using stories in organisations is in listening to stories, helping others to create their own authentic stories and making sense of the stories told.

Even that, however, proved problematic.  One of the points that I focus on early in any change workshop or project is that employee engagement and culture change do not fit straightforward, 12-step projects.  And "best practice" varies - what works in one organisation will not produce the same (or, on occasion, even similar) results in another.

The editors - generous in their comments and advice - wanted something simple that anyone could pick up and put into practice.  For me, it felt like the Mullah Nasruddin story that Dave Snowden references here (about 2/3rds of the way down the post).  I've always liked it, but now see exactly how a propos it is.

In the field of communications, I've often felt we do ourselves disservices by dumbing down.  Sometimes we need to stretch to reach that bit further.  Stretch our minds in particular...

 

Technorati tags: melcrum, employee engagement, storytelling, dave snowden, internal communications

"What I did in 2008"

[Continuing the short series of posts around themes common to New Year thoughts and change programmes.]

I've spent lots of time and effort in the past defining some ideal future and then mapping/planning how to achieve it.  It rarely works.  I certainly always found it frustrating that the plan was never really implemented - and put it down to a flaw in my own character.  Either my planning was bad, I wasn't clever enough or I wasn't implementing it properly - not persistent/hardworking/effective enough.

These days I'll put some time into thinking about where I'd like to be, but by looking backward from the end of the year, not by looking forward from the start.  So, instead of writing "What I will achieve in 2008" I'll imagine myself at New Year's Eve 2008 and write about "What I have achieved in 2008".  It makes for a far more realistic view of the year.

Instead of some ideal list of things that, when totted up, require more hours than are available and become depressing when they're not realised, a "What I did in 2008" list acquires a greater sense of reality and realistic expectation.  It's also then easier to work backwards, building up the "what happened when" links, as opposed to working forwards trying to arrive at some hypothetical ideal.  [More on hypothetical ideals tomorrow]

And they all lived...

Like most change programmes, the start of a New Year is often seen as the point to launch new initiatives.  [Yes, it's an arbitrary date and lots of us feel New Year's Resolutions are passe, but there's still that significant point that allows us to entertain the possibility of a shift in life patterns.]

So the next few days will be reflections on both New Years and change programmes.

 

Most New Year's Resolutions are about new things to start - new beginnings, new aspirations - and hence create more things to do, to fit into already-full lives.  Where is the time for this to come from?  The piece that seems to be missing - and a fantastic opportunity to release some space to start the new things - is putting an ending on the past.

• What will you stop doing [in order to do something new]?
• What do you still think you should be doing but aren't?
• What plans did you put in motion that haven't worked but that you haven't closed off yet?

It's a recommendation that applies to individuals when they're contemplating new projects and organisations (particularly communicators) whenever they're embarking on change.  Block out some time to go back and see what started and never finished - and make an ending to it in some fashion.

The complexity of youth violence

I spent last Tuesday afternoon volunteering with WAVE Trust at the conference on Working to Reduce Serious Youth Violence.

Serendipity strikes again - last night Patrick Harris nominated KidsCo for this year's Colin Morley award in the Medinge Brands With a Conscience, and just as I arrive today Camille Batmanghelidjh, Kids Company Founder, stands up to present.

Very interesting model - working in London schools with seriously disadvantage children.  And in schools, the children are allowed to self-refer, making the support they need emergent rather than pre-determined. Particularly crucial given the chaotic environment many of these children are in.  Fascinating and healthy model.

The same goes for their street-level support - 200 children a day, often without the stability that most of us take for granted.  Stabilising influences actually being unstabilising and threatening - in complexity terms, potential attractors being repellors.

Many of the speakers were excellent, with some notable standouts.  What was particularly noticeable was the degree to which complexity was the space in which they operated, not complicated.  Very few approaches called for processes or procedures or rules and regulations, instead it was about building different network structures (social), understanding identities, introducing probes and then reinforcing barriers or attractors.

The most noticeable point for me was the survey of London boroughs - what did they want first and foremost to help reduce youth violence?  More youth activities.  An attractor in complex space if ever I heard it.

Technorati Tags:  WAVE Trust ,  George Hosking ,  KidsCo ,  youth culture ,  violence ,  complexity ,  Colin Morley award

Masterclass - Change Management in the Public Sector - 6th December 2007

Just a brief note to let you know that we're managing to squeeze in one last masterclass in 2007.  It'll be in London on 6th December, with details available from Ark Group at the following link:

Change management in the public sector - the Ark Group

Powered by ScribeFire.

Workshop references

Thanks to the participants in today's workshop - it makes it so much more fun for me and useful for everyone when it's interactive and relevant rather than one of my monologues.  It's always where I'm aiming, but it helps to have a great bunch of people like this one.

As promised, here are some of the references:

• Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework is best explained in this article;
• Richard Wiseman's colour changing card video is on YouTube here;
• My original blog about the other video on cognition and attention is here;
• The slides themselves are here.

We've already got another Change Management in the Public Sector masterclass in the works for December - more details when I have the brochure.

A tool for building better habits

My recent post on culture being more about habits than big moments prompted a couple of questions - namely what tools actually help to create better habits.

The one that works for me has evolved around what was called a "win list".  It's a diary - but one that gets filled in at the end of the day.  Depending on where you want to shift your focus to, it could be filled in with things to be grateful for or, as in this case, for things that I've actually done.  [I used to suffer - and still do on bad days - from an underlying sense of having done nothing of value in any given day.]

Even in this raw form, I've found it can be a powerful lever in shifting my perception of a day.

To help build habits, however, I've added a couple of things.  They play to my competitive instinct, so you may want to adapt them to fit.

1. For habits that are new, but I want to make regular, I started adding a count of how many consecutive days I'd managed to do them.
2. To add a challenge, in brackets I then added the current longest number of consecutive days I'd previously managed.

It's not difficult, and it can feel slightly silly, but it's proved very powerful for me.  What were occasional tasks have become regular, what were supposed to be regular tasks have become rock-solid parts of my day, while some habits have become so automatic I don't even notice them.

It also means that, at the end of the day when putting the list together, I'll go and do something simply to ensure that I don't have to go back to counting from 1 again.

Most powerful example?  2227 days without a cigarette.

 

Technorati tags: win list, habit building, culture change

The jump from idea to danger

I've just got John Brockman's What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable from amazon.co.uk and I'm dipping into it.  One particular thought that's struck me arises from Stephen Pinker's introduction.  [I'm as yet undecided about Pinker, as what little of his I've read seems to imply that he interprets the brain as an information processing machine, but that may be either my misunderstanding of him or my paucity of reading his actual material.]

From his introduction:

What makes an idea 'dangerous'?  One factor is an imaginable train of events in which acceptance of the idea would lead to an outcome that only recently has been recognized as harmful.

It echoes one of the points I picked up from Gary Klein's Sources of Power.  Imagination is a critical element in many intellectual activities, although it's usually thought of as a childish, negative or unrealistic factor.

It's also a key factor in understanding people's reluctance to engage with change programmes or any new imperative.

We have an amazing ability to construct narratives out from a single point to some future end-point.  Whether it's from a single 'dangerous' idea out to the collapse of western civilisation (with apologies to both Copernicus and Darwin) or from 're-engineering the organisation' out to mass-redundancies and automisation of my job.

The overall story may be justified or not, it may be built from a fallacy or a truth, but the fact remains that it's rarely the initial idea that repels, it's usually the perception of how the story ends.

 

Technorati tags: ideas, narrative, Gary Klein, Edge.org

The danger of building a programme

Naming or branding a change or development programme may give it more attention and higher immediate recognition, but its effects are often to reduce its long-term effectiveness.

One of the strongest signals any decision-maker sends is not what they say but what they pay attention to persistently.  It's the regular weekly figures that speak more loudly than the once-a-year town hall presentation.  It's the persistence of attention, not the intensity, as Schein says.

So, when change or innovation are perceived as areas in need of attention, it's far healthier to build habits and rituals of persistence attention to the need. 

Instead, it's often that a fabulous new organisation-wide roll-out of training or tools is announced.  The area in question - change, innovation, leadership, customer-first, etc - is named as the next big thing and away we go.  Then, as other pressures intrude and programme leaders are promoted, it fades quietly into the background, to be safely ignored again in favour of the day-to-day numbers.

Few people lose their jobs for not taking part in a training programme, plenty do for not making their numbers.  Guess which any sane person thinks is more important?

Day-to-day staples work, flavour of the month doesn't.

 

Technorati tags: leadership, change management, innovation, rituals, persistence

Upcoming events

I'm running a workshop before Ark Group's conference on Knowledge Management in the Public Sector.  The workshop is on 25th September 2007 in London, titled "Working effectively through times of change".

The conference brochure, including workshop details, is here.

Magic bullets and long-hauls

Over the years, I've taken part in various personal development schemes and seminars.  [I'd like to think with positive results, but I'll let other people be the judge of that.]  I've noticed that some friends and participants view these as the crux of transformations - and that if, months later, their lives haven't changed dramatically then either a) the event/course was a failure or b) they need to do another one to get that hit/top-up again.

It's similar thinking to New Year's resolutions - the idea of a magic bullet to change a life.

The same often seems to apply in organisations looking to change.  Lots of focus on "the moment" or "the event", and then an expectation that everything will be different having crossed some virtual Rubicon.

It's possible - in rare cases - but I'm deeply suspicious of the approach.  If organisational culture is that conglomeration of habits and little things that allow people to make sense of their environment [and our lives are the accumulation of our habits and perceptions], a change in culture [life] requires a change in habits.

Organisations look for magic bullet solutions when greater results are likely to accrue from the long-haul of changing daily rituals and habits.  It's just this approach tends to be less exciting, more arduous and impossible to hand over to some external partner/adviser.  It's got to be done by people in the organisation on a daily basis - awareness of bad habits, persistence of good ones.

The same goes for those seminars and courses.  Most, if not all, have included long-term tools to be practised regularly to reinforce or embed initial shifts made at the time.  And, in conversation, I find that those whose changes were temporary have often chosen to ignore the tools and rely instead on the magic bullet.

 

I've had a tendency to look at how I operate and how Narrate operates and look for magic bullet solutions myself.  In December 2006 I made the conscious choice to stop looking to implement the one perfect solution (David Allen's Getting Things Done was always the big one) and instead focus in 2007 on slowly, persistently building methodical habits instead.

Halfway through the year and some things have stuck and proved successful, others are being introduced (or re-introduced) now to continue the process for the remainder of the year.  It's working - momentum building and new habits that are more productive than forever trying to re-engineer the perfect magic bullet.

 

 

Technorati tags: corporate culture, change management, habits

Change management in the public sector

Just a note to say that there are a few spaces left for the Change Management in the Public Sector masterclass we're running in Leeds on 13th June with Ark Group.

I don't have the event brochure available right now, but you can sign up here.

The London masterclass on 23rd May doesn't appear on the website, so I suspect it's full, but it might be worth calling them on +44 (0)20 8785 2700 to see if there are any last-minute cancellations.

Where the paths meet - or diverge...

There are certain things that have been common to lots of the change and culture projects I've been involved with over the past few years.  One of the biggies is that the projects usually cut across traditional department boundaries.  (If they don't, then they should...)

Typically, they include HR, management development, communications, organisational development, change management and others.  Yet usually, they're all headed in different directions, talking different languages and - obviously - thinking about the problems from different - and diverging - angles.

Management development are off training everyone on something relevant, communications are creating intranets and newsletters that talk about the new principles, etc, etc.  Everyone walking their professional path - not even parallel, but generally diverging - in the hope that their individual route to the end destination will coincide with everyone else's.

Bad enough in a complicated (cf Dave Snowden's framework) situation, but disastrous in a complex one - with emotional, non-rational human agents...

Internal communications conference references

As promised, here are the various references from yesterday's presentation at the internal communications conference:

1. The Neuroscience of Leadership from Strategy+Business magazine - a good start on how to change behaviours 
2. Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions by Gary Klein - an excellent book that should be required reading for anyone trying to understand or influence people's decisions and actions 
3. The Hero and the Outlaw: Harnessing the Power of Archetypes to Create a Winning Brand - an interesting look at how organisations can position themselves in ways that are easily recognisable and resonate with their audiences

My slides are also here

Mark Barratt made reference to Bill Quirke's Making the Connections: Using Internal Communication to Turn Strategy into Action, while Marc Silverside of Macmillan Cancer Support invited visits to Macmillan Cancer Support