partum intelligendo

Egypt - social media was not a silver bullet

I've just seen another article about how social media caused change in Egypt. (I'm not going to link to it - or any of the others - as I don't want to encourage the causal thinking behind it.) The other element I've seen mentioned as important in the Egypt changes earlier this year is that "everyone stayed on message."

Now, the former element had a role to play - but it's too tempting to assign it too much importance in the piece. The second - staying on message - is just wishful thinking on the part of someone who wants to convince their salary-payer to stick to the script - which is a dangerous and seriously wrong interpretation that doesn't stand up to any scrutiny of the facts.

There are two important elements here that intertwine:

• Social media increased the level of interaction between people and groups - creating favourable conditions for conversations and information to flow quickly and to wider audiences than was previously the case. It created an echo chamber that would respond to whatever messages started to resonate with the people interacting in the networks. In that sense, it seems to be a preferable, but neither necessary nor sufficient condition for mass change.
  
  One of the products of a spread of mass social media in Egypt was creating an environment in which events that were small-scale could serve as catalysts to the change. There were probably many potential catalysts, but notice is usually only given to the ones that actually take hold and trigger events. Any full-scale analysis of the Egyptian situation would need to look at huge volumes of data, paying particular attention to the outliers - to events that were briefly talked about but petered out before taking hold on a large scale.
    
• Messages - in fast-changing, diverse situations like a fermenting country - are rarely designed, planned and executed. Or at least, they may be, but that's rarely a successful strategy. The second fallacy I mentioned above arises from looking at an end result (i.e. an apparent clear message*) and thinking "How was that successful?". That thought, for people who spend their lives planning communications, leads to the assumption that the communication was planned - and that everyone stuck to the message. (It's tempting, but roughly equates to assuming that life is the product of "Intelligent Design".)
  
  Instead, I offer this: in the vast, inter-connected echo chamber mentioned above, many and diverse messages appeared from thousands of different people. Some were picked up and re-transmitted, increasing the echo factor and making them louder. As this happened, weaker messages that did not have the same appeal diminished, making the dominant messages seem even louder - increasing the number of people hearing them. At some point, these messages reached critical mass, drowning out other messages (which would still have been being generated, but would have had a higher bar to reach in order to be heard) - and outsiders observing the system at that point would note that "everyone is on message."

While this doesn't apply everywhere - bounded applicability after all - I do think that if you're facing a dynamic, fast-moving complex environment, planning can only show you roughly what not to do and broadly what might be worth saying. More specific than that, I don't believe that analysis and planning can take you.

Instead, I think a better, faster and more effective route is to take an evolutionary approach - diverse (but coherent) vehicles and messages, fast feedback loops to show what effect is being had and then rapid adaptation. Not with the goal of finding a single message or a best practice, but to develop a constantly evolving, more resilient approach.

*Which I would disagree with at the most basic level - the appearance of a clear message is more down to misinterpretation from a non-Egyptian cultural perspective, missing nuances and differences in varying communications.

Giving voice to everyone - avoiding overload, cacophony

One of the great truisms in communications and development work (these days, I seem to be having conversations in both areas and am aware of their similarities) is that "we want to hear from everyone, give everyone a voice". The principled, idealistic side of us believes that, but the pragmatic side veers away from it - if everyone had a voice, the result would be nothing more than noise. Single voices would be drowned out, and all that anyone listening would hear would be the general hum of thousands of conversations - with the occasional howl of outrage emerging from the sonic ocean.

One of the benefits of using SenseMaker™ - as was shown last week in an interesting environment - is that it allows for lots of voices (over a hundred in this case, thousands in another current project) but allows for patterns of meaning to emerge, without getting trapped in the individual words.

While the voice that is collected is personal, contextual and authentic - allowing people to say what really matters and why - the next step is all-important. They then then put tell us what that story, that narrative, actually means - by simply putting it into a simple framework. Often, as last week, it's a simple mark on a triangle. And it's then the accretion of marks from hundreds or thousands of stories that produces the emergent patterns - the overall voice of the population.

(With some judicious demographics collection it's then possible to see how different groups' voices tell different stories too.)

And from the patterns, it's then easy to drill back down to the individual voices - meaning that everyone's voice is heard and recorded, that everyone's voice has equal weight in the emergent patterns, but we can hear the overall voice of the people rather than just a cacophony.

It's opening up some truly interesting projects - more on which in due course...

Dots to be joined...

It's been a busy couple of months - with a number of things that I'll be putting up here in the coming weeks. Including, excitingly, the next pilots for the Children of the World project...

In the meantime, however, some apposite quotes around ways of making changes and the work we've been - and are - doing at the moment.

"[He] started in the wrong place. He didn't look around, and watch and learn, and then say, 'This is how people are, how do we deal with it?' No, he sat and thought, 'This is the people ought to be, how do we change them?'

Night Watch, Terry Pratchett

"'A healthy galaxy is forever poised on the edge of chaos, transixed between the sterile wasteland of order and the mad wilderness of rampant entropy.' ... [The organisation] was structured to thrive on diversity, multiplex thinking, multicultural societies.

"Nice trick. Starting is easy.

"It's keeping it going that's so hard."

Heaven, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

"In a world where everything is connected, advance signs of change, of turbulence, are likely to appear only when we look in unexpected places."

The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo

"Narrow-gazing not only leads to kinds of misfires, it also fatally constrains the ability to imagine good ideas or policies. The chance for real brilliance or flair is usually best seen out of the corner of the eye."

The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo

"[Chinese students instinctively knew] the environment contained clues to what was about to happen. If you stared at a single spot in the world around you, that incipient sensibility would be dulled to the point of uselessness."

The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo

Yup, as I've said before, Joshua Cooper Ramo's book is great - my copy has pages and pages of underlined phrases. Read it. Just read it.

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.

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.

Branding - in the customer's mind, not yours

Yesterday's post on understanding how customers see you - and what they value about you - embellishes a conversation I've been having recently with branding experts and internal communicators.

Now, the definition of a brand varies according to the discipline and thinking of the person on the other side of the table - all the following are versions that I've heard:

• A shortcut to a decision
• A trigger for patterns in long-term memory
• A promise or commitment
• A story

All of which work in their contexts. And all agree that the important element is that all these happen within the customer's mind.

Where it comes unstuck is that the focus is still on the customer when it comes to branding. There's a bigger article that Ton and I have talked about - complexity and branding - but for now it's enough to note that while yesterday's example was around sales and customer processes, it should be the first stop of all branding.

First, understand what customers see your brand as. And that may well change from person to person, from application to application and from place to place. (E.g. my iPod Touch is a business tool when I'm in meetings - a calendar, email, reference document storage; when I'm travelling, it's an entertainment device with opportunities to read heavy articles if I'm feeling virtuous; when I'm keeping my children occupied, it's a games machine. The iPod Touch brand then varies according to my role and context. Ask me to define it and I can't do it out of that context without losing half of that valuable data.)

Secondly, take the material - the micro-narratives - that come back as part of that research to the brand/advertising/marketing teams. And let them build the new material and messages from authentic, real examples. (In the UK, one bank used advertisements featuring customers talking - complete with authentic-sounding um's and er's)

From the patterns that come through, it's also easy to see which elements of customers' beliefs are particularly fixed, which are likely to change suddenly and which are open to opportunity - great places to start the next evolution of the brand...

Knowing what your customer values about you

Most companies think they know what their customer thinks of them - some through customer surveys, others through feedback. But most have it wrong - because their starting point for looking at what customers say is their own marketing and branding. So the values or marketing proposition they've defined themselves are the values they test customers against.

Yet they may have it completely wrong.

Some of the work we've been doing recently revolves around helping companies see themselves as their customers see them. Collecting stories about how they use services, about times when they interact with the call centre or the sales rep. Analysing those stories to see what differentiates negative experiences from bad ones, what sorts of interactions generate trust or erode it. And, instead of looking for "how many stories are about service/benefit A/problem X", looking to see what patterns emerge.

One client recently expected to see "speed of service" coming out as a crucial element (they were about to launch a programme to improve exactly that). Absent from the data. Not a sausage. Instead, their customers wanted to be sure about the quality of the service - to some surprise, big customers were relying heavily on it. (Company execs were assuming that it was a useful, but not critical, part of customers' business.)

Standard surveys would have asked about "speed of service" specifically and, because no-one will ever say "I want slow service", they would have got a positive response to wanting faster service - a reinforcement of their own beliefs.

Instead, they could divert the intended resources to quality - safe in the knowledge that that investment would pay real dividends with their customers.

To them it was a breakthrough - particularly given that these customers were large multi-nationals with high value contracts. A false step can cost tens of thousands - better to know for real, than to be reassured of a false result...

Business approaches for "complex" problems

With Andrew Moore at DAV Management, I've written a piece recently: "New approaches to 'big' problems".

It's a business piece talking about how new complexity-based approaches can offer major benefits in terms of better insights, reduced costs and greater customer loyalty over the traditional approaches to the problems. In particular, we talk about:

• using customer experience to drive innovation
• building empathy with your customers
• how to build early detection of (and hence fast response to) problems into your customer processes
• supporting sales reps when they are operating separately and in very difficult (complex) environments

And how the same, radically-different approaches offer better results than standard research/survey instruments for lower long-term costs.

 

European capacity for sensemaking and complexity

We're building European capacity for our clients and our projects!

I'm delighted to make the official announcement that UK-based Narrate and Netherlands-based Top Innosense are partnering to create the sense-making capability that can support the projects that we're seeing across Europe. With experts like Harold, Ton, Erwin and Aart-Jan, we're looking forward to sharing some of the projects we've each been doing for clients around customer insight, employee engagement, social media and more.

The Top Innosense team describe themselves thus (via the not-entirely-clumsy Google Translate):

TOP innosense helps organizations make better use of the insights, ideas and intelligence of large groups of people. And we usually mean big big.

Whether it's tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of civilians, hundreds or thousands of employees or patients per day, TOP innosense can help you understand what's happening and what drives them. And then we will help you to translate this knowledge into action. So:

• Are you looking for an effective method to develop new products and launch?
• Want your competitors by better understanding the needs, opinions or suggestions of your customers?
• Would you really let your citizens participate in the city?
• Do you understand the numbers behind your last patient satisfaction survey?
• Want to make better use of the knowledge of your employees and / or the aging wave cope?
• Are you looking for an effective method to develop new products and launch?
• Want to adjust your strategy in time to adequately respond to future developments?
• Want to improve your service and your service portfolio innovate?
• Want to identify dangerous situations before something really goes wrong?
• Do you know of employees who leave your organization hold?
• Or do you have another challenge facing the familiar management tools not answer that?

TOP innosense then you've come to the right place!

 

Idiom a deus is dos

In the current climate, the title of this post seems to be increasingly appropriate.

Or it would, if it weren't utter nonsense. It's a fabulous example of people interpreting someone else's words and viewpoint. In this case, someone has entered into an online database the lyrics to a song - in this case, by the Cocteau Twins, a UK band in the 80s and 90s. While some of their material had lyrics, much of it didn't - Liz Fraser used her fabulous voice as an instrument. So sometimes she's just making sounds, not singing intelligible words. That didn't stop someone, however:

Ik does a dashik dozen
Ik does alone cheyenne
Mad at them who tease him scrawling

And I knew deeper darlin
Idiom a deus is dos
Indeared look he loves it
Your elan new sub dearie

The difficulty sets in when we use experts to tell us what was meant by what someone said, or symbols they use, or stories they tell. Sometimes they get it right, but sometimes they're so busy trying to make sense of it, they miss that there was no sense in the first place, just a general feeling. And of course, they can only ever get it to make sense in their frame of reference, their worldview. If it comes from a culture radically different, they will have to either ignore it or distort it to make it fit their culture.

Actually, maybe the idea of reading meaning where there is none is pretty appropriate in the current climate after all...

Missing the point - rules that confuse

In rules-based organisations, there is a real tendency to add new rules to suit new situations and when things are not going according to plan. It's not, however, effective.

Rules are like scaffolding around a building - they should be used for a while to support the building of the main structure, or in specific circumstances but not as a long-term strategy. Adding scaffolding to scaffolding creates a more rickety structure, increasingly unstable and susceptible to changes in the overall environment. And for people within the organisation, more rules simply gets more and more confusing.

[Picture from Britain being overrun by street signs | Reuters]

The other problem with lots of rules is that the response is usually to try and look for opportunities to get round the rules, as however well-intentioned they may be, they get in the way of the actual work getting done. They indicate a lack of trust - that people won't do the right thing without being told exactly what to do/not to do.

 

So (with notable exceptions that are genuinely complicated, not complex) more rules will reduce people's engagement/morale/whatevernamewe'regivingitthisweek and will make the organisation more brittle.

The alternative? Foster a culture that is mostly ideation(based on obligation to each other in a social environment), with rules saved only for particular rare instances.

Complexity

Improving sales, employee engagement using stories - the masterclass

Following the recent Pfizer case study, we've decided to run another masterclass - this time looking specifically at tools and techniques to apply narrative and storytelling in organisations.

Date: Thursday 7th April 2011, 9.30-16.30

Venue: Regus, Central London

Register: http://narrativemasterclass.eventbrite.com

Cost: £295 (Early bird tickets until 8th March £195)

This will be a very full day - expect to get your brain filled! We'll look at how to gather stories, as well as a conglomeration of the recent projects we've been working on - we've compiled a case study with all the learnings from a variety of different situations.

In the past few years, the use of stories has shifted from being "how you engage or tell your audience" to a much more sophisticated approach that monitors, measures and feeds back - making narratives the single most effective way to engage and understand audiences.

Narrate is at the forefront of using stories in organisation - including a recent project: Using stories to improve sales in Pfizer. (Case study from Strategic Communications Management here)

 

This intensive day will focus on how to collect, analyse and use stories to generate engagement, understand and adapt culture and improve bottom-line results through increased sales, greater innovation and spot opportunities for "more for less" approaches.

 

Collecting and listening to stories, however, requires particular skills that do not come naturally to most communicators. Nor is it something that everyone can pick up from a manual. This workshop will give participants practical advice and experience in using these techniques, along with feedback to guide them in using them effectively, including:

• How to collect stories in large volumes
• Pitfalls to avoid in capturing stories
• How to examine the stories for patterns of behaviour and belief
• Easier decision-making

Who should attend?

Anyone wrestling with complex problems such as:

• creating culture change
• increasing customer loyalty
• building trust
• improving sales results
• capturing the knowledge of retiring employees
• extracting lessons from projects
• improving service
• managing customer relationships

Masterclass - "a total lifechanger" for internal communications

I was talking with a client recently who asked me about the internal comms masterclass where we first met. Ark Group had asked me to run a masterclass that had got some great feedback and he wanted to know when he could send some of his team on a similar one.

We're talking about running a tailored version of the original one in-house for him, but I've decided that we'll run a public masterclass ourselves as an experiment as Ark have pulled out of the communications arena altogether.

As it's the first one and we want to keep it tailored to participants' needs, we're going to limit attendance to 10 people in the first place. I'll be leading it, but we'll be having some guest speakers along the way.

Date: Tuesday 22nd March 2011

Venue: Central London

Time: 9.30-16.00

Cost: £310
Early bird registration (before 8th March): £250

You can book online at Eventbrite: More for less - a one-day masterclass in internal communications

And we can adapt and offer it for in-house communications training - just ask.

The details:

In the current climate, individuals and organizations are under increasing stress. As a communicator, you are being asked to deliver more results in less predictable environments with fewer resources. Whether an experienced professional or a recent recruit, this masterclass will equip you with ideas, practical techniques and clear next steps.

It is perfectly possible to deliver "more for less" - what it requires is a new set of persepectives and tools to address employee engagement and internal communications.

This one-day masterclass will help you

• Understand and define the realities of internal communications in the current climate
• Generate understanding, buy-in and collaboration inside the organization
• Deliver and evaluate real behavioural changes
• Collect more content than you know what to do with
• Understand the limits of what you can do and can't do

Previous comments about Narrate masterclasses:

• Totally innovative! I’ve never done anything like this and enjoyed it. Am bursting with ideas for how I can apply this in my workplace – thanks for showing me all these things!

• A total life-changer!

• Excellent away-day. Practical and theoretical. Grounded in lots of examples and stories. Liked that it was a small group as lots of opportunities to share and network.

• A very useful course and I have learnt a lot of things that I can take back to the office re. communications.

• A very good course that I will recommend to colleagues.

An interactive day, focused and adapted to meet participants’ specific situations and challenges, it includes practical tools, principles, guest speakers and examples of communications from different sectors – to ensure that as a participant, you come away with pragmatic, useful material to put into action the minute you get back to your desk.

Masterclass leader:

Tony Quinlan, Principal Consultant and Chief Storyteller, Narrate

Tony is a business alchemist who founded Narrate in 2000 to create more effective, healthier organizational cultures and communications. He’s passionate about breaking out of rigid, purely rational communications to create real cultural and behavioral change. A member of the Cognitive Edge network, he is always exploring new ideas and practices, looking at current business practices from a different perspective. If you want 12-step models and the “same old, same old”, then you’ve got the wrong man.

A frequent keynote speaker and conference chair, Tony writes on communications, branding and culture for international publications and blogs at www.thenarrateblog.com. Today, he is a writer, keynote speaker, communications coach, masterclass presenter and international consultant. But he has also been a radio presenter, radar designer, TV tuner, dishwasher, lift attendant, software programmer and presented live public roadshows to 8,000 people at a time. Needless to say, he has stories about all of them.

Overall agenda:

9:30 Registration and refreshments

10:00 Introductions and objectives

• Making the course relevant

10:15 Thinking about internal communications

• Principles and goals

10.45 The role of the internal communicator

• Opportunities and obstacles
• Skills and support
• Collaboration and confidentiality

11:20 Morning Coffee Break

11:50 Communications in challenging times

• Mergers, redundancies and acquisitions

12:30 Innovative internal communications

• Better results on lower budgets
• The communications mix

13:10 Lunch

14:10 Dealing with major comms projects

• Values, change and organisational myths

14:50 Understanding the internal audience

• Using internal surveys
• Evaluating with meaning

15:30 Discussions and Next Steps

16:00 Close of Masterclass

Using stories to increase sales at Pfizer

The secret's finally out - this project last year was with Pfizer. This month's Strategic Communications Management magazine features Pfizer Communications Director Nigel Edwards' case study on the overall project.

If I'm honest, we were very proud of this one. Fast response, fast gathering and fast analysis - and using SenseMaker produced some fantastic, usable insights.

 

In Nigel's words: 

"The approach of gathering stories paid dividends...the subsequent analysis gave us insights no other method would have."

There was one additional piece that wouldn't fit into Nigel's case study, so for completeness I'm adding it here. It comes from the breakout box on the last page: "Understanding the results." The article includes an example of a histogram (polarity/diad) but here's the same for a triad:

In the triangles, each dot represents one set of indexes from a rep – i.e. their response to a particular story.

The overall pattern, therefore, gives the relative strengths of perceptions on each issue.

Boxes have been drawn around major clusters, with the number of data in each shown

SenseMaker

Details for the Cognitive Edge European Network meeting

As promised, here are more details of next week's European Cognitive Edge network meeting, kindly hosted by Mark Woodman.

Date: Friday 18th February 2011

Venue: Middlesex University, The Burroughs, Hendon, London

Time: 10.30 to 16.00 GMT

If you're coming, can you please register at EventBrite here as we want to have an easier system of keeping track of who's coming than collating email replies.

There’s a Google map for the location at:

http://www.mdx.ac.uk/aboutus/Location/hendon/index.aspx

That page has a link to printable guide to getting to us at:

http://www.mdx.ac.uk/Assets/msex_product_WEB.PDF

Attached is Mark's own marked up map showing Hendon Central Tube (Northern Line Edgware branch) and Hendon overground station (First Capital Connect from either St. Pancras International or Luton Airport Parkway). On my map routes from the stations are in red. There is a 183 bus near the Hendon overground station that comes right to the door of the University, but for most people the walk from Tube or train is 8-12 minutes and more predictable.

Complexity, SenseMaker

Qui persuadet persuadores

I've just got the December/January issue of Melcrum's Strategic Communications Management (SCM) magazine - presumably because the February/March issue will have a great case study of a project we did last year with a pan-European salesforce to improve revenue and sales on a particular product. I'll let you know in due course when that one comes out - and add a piece of additional material that got cut from the final article.

This issue, however, includes an article about something that always seems to get missed in most communications programmes: the communications team themselves.

Sally Jackson of EDF Energy writes about how to work with the internal communications team during change - focusing in particular on the often-overlooked fact that they may be trying to reassure the rest of the organisation, or at least clarify things, while going through substantial upheaval themselves.

I'd go further.

Too many communications teams are tasked with engaging and explaining the new vision or the new organisation to the rest of the business. (I'd challenge that there are better ways of going about all of this, but for now, let's assume that that's the process you're stuck with.) So, we have a bunch of people who have been given the task of making something appealing and understandable to everyone else.

How much time have the change drivers put into convincing the communications team? Have they been engaged or just presented with it and told to get on with it?

A decent team will, of course, ask questions to clarify matters for themselves and will be professional in communicating that onwards. But we know how subtle metaphors and cues can be in triggering responses from people. A professional team, with doubts, will give that impression in their work.

Increasingly, when we're involved in change processes, we insist on what appears to be a superfluous piece of work at the start of the project - working with the comms team as though they were the end-audience, engaging and explaining and working with them.

To twist the old maxim (and take liberties with my schoolboy Latin):

qui persuadet persuadores

Chart doesn’t work for colorblind

Every once in a while, I get a wake-up call that we often build communications and other materials around assuming a base set of abilities - ones that don't always apply.

Flowing Data posted this morning, linking to waxy.org - a site I hadn't come across before - and a blog on how nicely-designed charts can be impossible for people who are colourblind. In addition to showing the problem (see the image below), there's a helpful guide about what to do to improve matters.

[From Chart doesn’t work for colorblind]

It's easy to forget, however, that there's a substantial portion of our audience that may have difficulties receiving material done in standard communications formats - I once turned up to run a workshop with stimulus material neatly typed up, to find that one participant had visual difficulties. Another time it was literacy. At some point, we will no doubt find ourselves running anecdote circles with people with hearing difficulties.

The first few times we come across them, shifting mindset to produce communications and materials for people outside of our standard skillset or culture can be difficult. Once committed to, however, it quickly becomes just part of the landscape without needing special extra thought.

But the startpoint is to know - or estimate - how many people in the organisation may be effected. And it's better to estimate high rather than assume low numbers...

Solitude standing

A colleague in an organisation I partner with recently asked me for a CV for the website. So far, so normal. Then they asked for a list of presentations - something I've never really pulled together before. So I delved through the conference folders to find those times when I've stood at the front of a conference hall.

It turned out to be broader than I remembered and I'm rather proud of it, so I thought I'd share it. (I've taken out duplications like all the multiple workshops on storytelling, internal communications and change, along with repeat appearances at conferences.)

Presentations

 

• Working effectively through times of change, Knowledge Management in the Public Sector conference, September 2007
• Understanding employees and organisational culture, Association of Police Public Relations Officers annual conference, November 2008
  
• Mapping mentally complex situations, Innovative Visualisation and Cartographic Language conference, Luxembourg, April 2009
• Complexity and Creativity keynote presentation, Annual conference of creativity academics, University of Greenwich, July 2009
• Challenges and opportunities in a crisis keynote presentation, Local Government Communications annual conference, Nottingham, May 2009
• Retaining essential business capital, Knowledge and Content UK conference, London, June 2009
• Change management in the public sector series of workshops, Ark Group, London, Singapore, Leeds and Manchester, 2005-2007
• Developing a knowledge sharing culture, London, January 2005
• Narrative for public policy, US State Department Strategic Communications network, October 2009
• An introduction to narrative, Royal Navy Information Operations training programme, November 2009
• Putting the public in the picture, Local Government Leaders programme, Harlow, December 2009
• Internal Communications masterclass, Ark Group, London, January 2010
• Narrative in Leadership, Informatology conference, London, April 2010
• Babies, bathwater and targets - future trends in healthcare, Henley Alumni conference, September 2010
• Why good research isn’t enough, Higher Education External Relations Association annual conference, December 2010