partum intelligendo

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

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