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_)

Standards for England conference slides

I've spent the last couple of days in Birmingham with Standards for England at their Annual Conference. The slides are here: Standards for England presentation October 2009

It's highly pictorial, so may not make a huge amount of sense without the audio. Of which there isn't one for this presentation. I will, however, put up the audio and slides shortly from the KCUK session earlier in the year, which covered some of the same material.

Tony Quinlan, Chief Storyteller, Narrate

Five Tribes, not Two

A fleeting visit to Geneva yesterday - it's always nice to arrive at the destination at 9am, in sync with everyone else's working day, but leaving the house at 5am really doesn't work for me, particularly when there's a school governor's meeting at the other end of the day. But all that travelling means clearing some email and finally catching up on some of the recent TED talks on the iPod.

The one that struck me most was David Logan's on tribal leadership . Nice to see the focus being on groups of people rather than on the individuals - although I'm not sure about the categorisation of five basic types of tribe (with apologies to Frankie Goes To Hollywood for the poor blog title above). One thing useful that I'm going to think further on is David's comment about the need to communicate with levels above and below where we are - making the conscious choice to talk only to one level is fine, but often isn't it just an assumption that we're all on the same level. Or, more perniciously, the only people worth talking to are.

I was also intrigued by his comments on the Worldwide poll as being such a startling thing from a market research company. Shouldn't that be an obvious one, just difficult to implement?

It also plays into my concerns about how research and surveys are done - while they're great in some places, I've spoken a lot in recent years to communicators and influencers about the lack of meaning in survey results and hence the confusion about what actions to take next. I think surveys and market research are an industry and a model with a powerful sway and a need for continued investment that distorts there actual usefulness.

[In the interests of disclosure, I've spent much of this past year working on pilots for an altogether different way of looking at cultures around the world, involving stories naturally. There'll be more at appropriate moments on this blog.]

Written by Tony Quinlan, Chief Storyteller, Narrate

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...

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.

Diverse hearts and minds

(Tomorrow I'll confirm the Melcrum masterclass details and how to register.)

I notice in the CommsNetwork mailing list there are recent emails asking for advice on how to "engage people in values".  My inference (and I think most correspondents' implication) is that they're actually asking how they get everyone to conform to the values as best as possible.

Responses cover the usual sins and techniques, focusing on events, comms vehicles, etc.  Nowhere is there the helpful response of "You'll never make them all sign up to the values and behave accordingly".  And even less so the addition "And if they did, it would be disastrous for the organisation"

Why do we continue to indulge this lazy thinking and idealistic, managerial way of working?  There are legal requirements around diversity in the workforce - diversity of colour, gender, ability, age, etc.  Assuming that you've got people who are different in their experiences, their outward qualities, what on earth makes you think they should think the same?

You want people who think and act differently - it's how you make the business effective, robust and innovative.  The real challenge for communicators should be how you enable conversations, dissent and then action from the diverse population.

Upcoming conference

I've agreed a couple of further public engagements in the first quarter of 2009, and won't be taking any more conferences/internal events now until after April/May, although I'm happy to talk now about later events.

One public one that's agreed now is the Ark Group's European conference: "4th annual internal communications: a vital business function in difficult financial times".  I'll be chairing for the two days 11th-12th February 2009 in London.

Further details on Ark Group's website at www.ark-group.com

 

I will be re-running the Narrative Tools masterclass with Melcrum later this month, but there's some confusion over dates - I'll put details up once it's confirmed.

Killing two industries with one email

From the Thinking Allowed email from yesterday, mention of Lawrie Taylor's experience of years earlier when asked to help with a piece of market research:

I’d always assumed these big companies – and this was one of the biggest – must be entirely independent bodies.  Not at all.  The first question their representative asked could hardly have been less objective.  ‘What sort of results are you looking for?’ he asked.   ‘Well’ said my man from the PR company.  ‘We’d rather like to find that the public would welcome more retail facilities on forecourts.’

 

‘Good’ said the polling man, making a note.  ‘And will you need a cover organisation to publish the results?’ ‘Preferably’ said my man. 

 

In no more than sixty seconds I’d been give a perfect demonstration of how the PR industry works. 

And people in the market research and PR industries wonder why we don't get more respect.

 

I know that there are many (not most, but many) people in the industries that would blanch at this as I do, but until there is a visible, conscious and concerted effort to change these practices, we're always going to be tarred with the same brush.   

From the horse's mouth.

From Jasper Fforde's "First Among Sequels", two horses talking together while their book is being repaired:

"So what's this Pride and Prejudice all about, then?"

"It's about a horse that pulls a carriage for the Bennets."

Which seems to tie in neatly to those companies that offer poor customer service that I posted about earlier.

KCUK - Building a change management strategy

Thanks to everyone who participated in last week's workshop at the KCUK conference.  Various odds and sods off the back of the session:

• My presentation slides are here

• The basketball video I mentioned.

• The Harvard Business Review article on complexity/leadership/decision-making by Dave Snowden
• Dave's in-depth article on complexity and its implications, "The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world"

It was a distinctly Reduced Shakespeare Company take on the subject - so we're thinking of building a full one-day masterclass around it.  Thoughts to me at tony@narrate.co.uk